NBA Q&A: Stan Van Gundy
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, August 28, 2013 with No comments
Courtesy of Ethan Sherwood Strauss
Why are coaches getting fired so often when they dictate so much of the game?
That one I would have a hard time explaining. You get to the point where you're changing 13 jobs in one year, over 40 percent of your league and three guys [Vinny Del Negro of the Clippers, Lionel Hollins of the Grizzlies, George Karl of the Nuggets] who led their teams to the most wins in franchise history. Look, there's a lot of different reasons and I certainly don't know the ins and outs of each situation, but I think a large part of it is that there's sort of been a new breed of general manager coming into the league. We had younger guys. We've got guys not coming from coaching backgrounds as much. More guys coming from the analytics backgrounds. And they want different things than their head coaches. And I think in large part, I think a lot of them, [you] hire younger GMs without a coaching background.
My theory is that not all, but some of those guys are intimidated by experienced coaches that have their way of doing things and they're more comfortable having younger guys, first-time guys that they feel will listen to them more, that they will have more control over. So, there definitely has been a change. I think it's more coming from the GM side, but all of these things in the NBA tend to run in cycles, so we'll just have to see where it goes.
Why do you and Dwight Howard remain friends? Why do you still frequently text each other after everything that happened?
I do think that one thing that we all do is look at the whole picture when you're looking at something. And there's no one I know, there's no one that I care about, people I'm a lot closer to than guys I've coached like my family, there's not one of them I haven't had major disagreements with.
One, you still love them and everything else, but also you're judging by the whole picture. So, I can look at what Dwight did for me as a coach and for our whole basketball team in Orlando and everything else and I'm very, very appreciative.
Plus, I don't think there was ever a point where I didn't like Dwight personally. I like him. I've had a lot of laughs with him. He's a good guy. We had some things that we disagreed on. We had some things we disagreed strongly on and some times where we pissed each other off. And those were well-documented. But it doesn't negate all of the good things he did and the good times that were there in the five years we were together. So for me, it's not a hard thing to overlook.
Just look back at your life and the people in your life. If you're really being honest about it, then you're going to think of major blowups you had with those people. You're going to think of times you stormed out of the house. But you keep coming back because for the most part you will work off things in the big picture. You have to be careful not getting caught up in the moment too much.
Can media coverage have a corrosive impact on a team?
The media's job is different than ours. Let's put it this way: The media can certainly be a challenge. You're out looking for stories. And that's your job. And for a lot of people, maybe not a lot, but for a few people, the easiest way is to look for the negative.
The whole world has different challenges now with the 24-hour news cycle and just the volume of stuff that's out there. And everybody has to get out there. So you've got all these people now, because it's online 24 hours, if I want to get noticed, I got to have something different. And so the beat reporter writes his story and the team played well and blah blah blah. Well, I can't write that same story now. Nobody's going to read it.
So every angle is going to be covered. Every angle. That's not just in sports. That's in everything. It certainly presents a challenge, but I don't think that that's something you can blame on the media. I think coaches sometimes look at the media as the enemy. I don't think that's fair. It's going to be like any profession. Ninety-nine percent of the people are going to work hard and just try to do a good job. And you're going to find that 1 percent that lacks integrity, will trump up stories, won't be honest, but there's so few of them. I never wanted to look at the media as an enemy, I never wanted my players to look at the media as an enemy.
Do coaches get frustrated by media ignorance of strategy and details?
I never really got that frustrated by that. You have to realize that their level of knowledge is not going to be what a coach's is. The criticism from the media never really bothered me. I'd correct it when I can, but that's their job. If stuff wasn't personal, then it really didn't bother me.
I'm sure I've pissed off everybody I've ever met one way or another. And whether they like me or not, I hope they're at least basing it on the whole picture.
Is watching the NBA more fun now that you’re not coaching?
I would say I probably enjoyed it more when I was coaching because I was more specifically looking at it in terms of, "Wow, that would be good for our team" if I was just watching another game or, "When do we play that team? We're going to have to do this." I enjoyed the deeper analysis more than I enjoy just sitting down and watching a game.
I enjoyed how I watched the games as a coach more than I do how I watch games now.
Why do you respect (Tampa Bay Rays manager) Joe Maddon so much?
He is very analytical in what he does. Is there any way he can gain an advantage with his shifts, probably the most obvious one, or squeeze bunting? He's not afraid to go against the book. He's not managing worried about what might be said if something doesn't work. He's going to analyze situations and go with what he thinks gives his team the best chance to succeed in that situation and not worry about the possible repercussions. And to me, that's the biggest thing to learn.
Does the fear of criticism stifle coaching creativity?
I don't think what would hold me back or hold a lot of coaches back, being worried about what people are going to say. I think it's that I trend toward wanting to go with the tried and true. Something where, I've seen this work. I know this succeeds in the NBA. That's what I want to do.
I know that these principles that we have work and we're going to stick to those. I just go with what I have seen work. I certainly would not call myself creative. There are other coaches who are innovative and everything else. I wouldn't be that guy, that's for sure.
I'd certainly seen four shooters around a big guy work before. So that might not have been the conventional way everybody was doing it, but number one, I had seen it work, and number two, it was certainly what fit our team the best. It might not have been at the time, in 2007, conventional, but I wouldn't say that it was innovative in any way. People had done it. But you can go back to Robert Horry playing the 4 and Matt Bullard [in Houston]. Maybe I was doing it differently than a majority of the league, but it wasn't new.
Who are the most innovative coaches, in your opinion?
Mike D'Antoni might be the closest to someone who's doing something really differently among coaches in our league.
Gregg Popovich was the first guy I know who, and he still does it more than anybody, resting players the way he does over the long haul. There’s still not people who do it like he does. I don't think I would ever do it that way. But he's done it with great success. That's an innovation I guess. In the Xs and Os, there are so few things that you see and say, "Wow, I've never seen that before."
How do you feel about reducing minutes?
It's sort of in all sports now. You look at baseball and pitchers have gone from a four-man rotation to a five-man rotation and pitch counts and all of that. And if you're a guy in the NBA who plays your players 38, 40 minutes a night, the media's going to beat you up for it. That's always been a curious thing to me, because, number one, so many people in the media who'll beat coaches up for things supposedly have this analytical background, but I haven't seen them come out with one thing that indicates that, you know what, if guys play this many minutes then they get hurt less than guys who play this many minutes. I haven't seen any of that so that's curious that they've sort of accepted the value of playing guys fewer minutes over the course of the year.
The second thing that's curious, could be in all sports is supposedly now, if we go back 30 or 40 years, maybe only 20. Supposedly now, our athletes are better, they're bigger, stronger faster athletes.
We've got better training, OK. We've got better nutrition. We've got all this technology. Our travel is a lot better. They're not traveling commercial. Everything is set up better, and yet, they're not capable of playing the minutes or pitching the innings that guys did 30 or 40 years ago! I don't get that. And it's not like players are hurt less now than players in those years. Those guys used to play every day. They played 82 games, they played 40 minutes a game. Now, supposedly all these great improvements we made, our athletes aren't capable of doing that.
The media is not privy to what goes on in practice. So, the media assumes that the only thing that matters in the balance between rest and work is, “How many minutes a guy plays in a game.” Well, to me, and I'm not saying this happens, but let's say a guy only averages 32 minutes a game but that coach practices really hard on the days in between. To me, that guy is going to be potentially more fatigued than a guy who plays 38 minutes a game but gets rest on the days in between.
Every coach in every sport, one of their larger concerns is the balance between work and rest. We all think about it all the time. So, to think about it is good. But for people to pretend, again, if you want to do it and you want to figure it out and you want to show me that, throwing 200 innings a year instead of 300 that they used to throw will prolong careers, well show me that. If you want to show me that playing 30 minutes a game will prolong someone's career over playing 36 minutes a game, well show me that.
One of the knocks when I was working for Pat Riley was, "Oh, his practices were so hard. You go to him, it's going to shorten your career." Then I look around and say, well, Patrick Ewing played a damn long time. Charles Oakley played a damn long time. And Derek Harper played in his 30s and played a long time. And Mo Cheeks. And it's, "C'mon!" Where's the evidence of this?
That this work is shortening careers. And then you get these things like, Stephen Strasburg can only throw 160 innings last year. And I'm sitting there going, "Really? Where did you come up with that number?" Maybe 165? Maybe he should have thrown only 140? You guessed it! Come on, you guessed it! The hope is, that fewer innings means fewer problems and it will help him in the long run. But, they don't know and they had a great chance last year. Sitting him down certainly decreased their chances. And they're not even going to get in (the playoffs) this year. Maybe they wasted the only chance they're going to have.
Everybody is in a different situation. Gregg Popovich has had great players. So Gregg Popovich goes into the season knowing he's going to make the playoffs. And so, he can rest guys throughout the years. Well, if you're Mark Jackson and the Warriors or you know, you're the Dallas Mavericks last year. You've got no guarantees.
I think the most frustrating thing for a coach is those kind of things. Where you're being criticized for things that have no basis in reality. They're simply just opinions. We all got into this on the NBA level knowing, fairly or unfairly, we were going to be judged by winning and losing. And that's OK. But now you're Tom Thibodeau and you're winning. And you're still being judged because you're playing guys too much.
My brother's always asked the question: Does the human body really know the difference? Are you really more fatigued after having played 38 minutes over 36 minutes? Over the course of the year you're talking about, let's say it's 40 minutes over 36. You're talking over the course of five and a half months, a difference of 328 minutes on your body. Over five and a half months. Are you telling me there's an appreciable difference in fatigue at the point? I'm not buying that. But people just accept it.
There are some people, some strength and conditioning coaches that are on the cutting edge. Those people, they're zeroing in on it. Not on a number of minutes, but actually on good measurements of the human body to determine when guys are fatigued and when they're not. And that's the key point. I don't care about how many minutes you play. It could have been only 18 minutes. Maybe the guy's worn down or whatever, or he's not getting enough sleep. Right now, he's fatigued and needs rest. That is helpful information to a coach. Or to anybody running a team.
So your Magic teams adopted a distinct, spread-floor strategy. How did you come by it?
The plan -- not just my plan but [GM] Otis Smith's plan -- was that, when you have Dwight Howard, he's the centerpiece of your team. What you always want to do is take your best players and figure out how to complement them and the best way to help a big guy like that is to get him room on the floor. And you do that by putting as much shooting out there as possible.
When we looked at guys -- I mean they drafted [J.J.] Redick -- shooting was always a priority. And then what happened in that first year the same summer that I came here. Then we got Rashard [Lewis] and [Hedo Turkoglu] who are both 3-men, but clearly among their top four players [at their position], along with Jameer [Nelson], so they obviously were going to have to play together.
So one of them had to become a 4-man. Rashard was just a better fit at the 4. Look, if Tony Battie had not gotten hurt that year, there's a good chance that we would have played big at least half the game and not been quite as much four-out. With the roster we had, it was just an absolute necessity that we played the way we did. And I thought the shooting around Dwight really helped. The thought was always trying to put guys around Dwight that complemented him.
Is concocting NBA strategy actually fun? Coaches are so famously miserable.
I really enjoyed that part of the job. Sitting around with your staff, and kicking around ideas and looking at different things and trying to find the best way to make it work for your team. I find that to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the job, to think about those things and really, really try to make it fit and make it all work.
What aspect of what you did strategically were you most proud of?
There's a fairly small group of guys who are just going to be successful wherever they go and in whatever system they're in. I mean, they're just so talented or so versatile or whatever it is that, wherever you put them, they're really going to be successful. But I think a great majority of the league and probably some guys that are in and out of the league, it really comes down to getting in a place where you fit what's going on. So my first year here, we had Keith Bogans and Mo Evans splitting time as the starting 2. And they were both really successful. Courtney Lee started as a rookie the next year on a team that goes to the NBA Finals.
If you want them to do things that aren't really going to fit their strengths, then they're not going to be as good. And I think that's why some teams don't like a guy because he doesn't really fit what they're trying to do. And then he goes somewhere else and plays well and people’s first reaction is, "Team A made a bad trade in giving the guy up!"
Well, maybe not. He didn't really fit what they were doing. I think that fit is so important for, I don't know what percentage, 80 percent of the players in the league.
Did the rule changes in the early 2000s change the league a lot?
Coaches are going to adapt to whatever the rules are. The rules certainly change strategy. Even within that, even since that happened, things continue to evolve. People are always trying to find a different way.
One of the big ones that's changed a lot, even more than the illegal defense rules, is what you're able to do with your hands out on the perimeter guarding people. Your team defense became a lot better because it's becomes a lot harder individually to guard guys.
I remember when we had Dan Majerle when I was an assistant in Miami, and Dan, at that part of his career anyway, wasn't the quickest guy in the world but he could certainly move his feet. He was a real, real tough guy, and very committed. But with his strength, and under the rules at the time where you could put a forearm on the guy, Dan could really reroute guys and things like that. And that rule changed. To me, that probably changed NBA defenses.
Look, I mean, I've only been in the league 18 years. I mean, you can go back and talk to guys who were in it a long time ago. But the time I've been in [the forearm rule] changed NBA defense and NBA defensive strategy more than the illegal defense guidelines.
Do the rules have something to do with why centers are less involved offensively?
They've certainly become a lesser part of NBA offense. Now, the reason. I think there's multiple reasons. Most kids growing up don't want to play in there. It's not a lot of fun. There’s a lot of contact. You’re not handling the ball. You’re not getting to shoot it with range. That’s number one. The other reason, there’s just not enough people feeding into the NBA who are low-post players who want to do that work.
It’s always been a defended position. A guard can just sort of get the ball and get himself a shot. A center needs his teammates to bring the ball down into him.
Passing as a skill really hasn't gotten much better. A lot of coaches actually think it's gotten worse, and so that makes it harder to get guys the ball. Certainly the defensive rules have allowed us to do things that we previously couldn't do to make it harder on post people.
I mean, you can front the post and bring another guy over behind him. You could never do that kind of stuff before. Certainly the rules have contributed to that. And I also think, you combine the rules with now, how are you still going to be able to get the ball inside because you don't have a rule that artificially gets your post guy some room? That’s also led to putting more shooting on the floor, and teams playing smaller, because the only way now to prevent teams from doing those kinds of things is to put enough shooting on the floor to get those guys space.
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Why are coaches getting fired so often when they dictate so much of the game?
That one I would have a hard time explaining. You get to the point where you're changing 13 jobs in one year, over 40 percent of your league and three guys [Vinny Del Negro of the Clippers, Lionel Hollins of the Grizzlies, George Karl of the Nuggets] who led their teams to the most wins in franchise history. Look, there's a lot of different reasons and I certainly don't know the ins and outs of each situation, but I think a large part of it is that there's sort of been a new breed of general manager coming into the league. We had younger guys. We've got guys not coming from coaching backgrounds as much. More guys coming from the analytics backgrounds. And they want different things than their head coaches. And I think in large part, I think a lot of them, [you] hire younger GMs without a coaching background.
My theory is that not all, but some of those guys are intimidated by experienced coaches that have their way of doing things and they're more comfortable having younger guys, first-time guys that they feel will listen to them more, that they will have more control over. So, there definitely has been a change. I think it's more coming from the GM side, but all of these things in the NBA tend to run in cycles, so we'll just have to see where it goes.
Why do you and Dwight Howard remain friends? Why do you still frequently text each other after everything that happened?
I do think that one thing that we all do is look at the whole picture when you're looking at something. And there's no one I know, there's no one that I care about, people I'm a lot closer to than guys I've coached like my family, there's not one of them I haven't had major disagreements with.
One, you still love them and everything else, but also you're judging by the whole picture. So, I can look at what Dwight did for me as a coach and for our whole basketball team in Orlando and everything else and I'm very, very appreciative.
Plus, I don't think there was ever a point where I didn't like Dwight personally. I like him. I've had a lot of laughs with him. He's a good guy. We had some things that we disagreed on. We had some things we disagreed strongly on and some times where we pissed each other off. And those were well-documented. But it doesn't negate all of the good things he did and the good times that were there in the five years we were together. So for me, it's not a hard thing to overlook.
Just look back at your life and the people in your life. If you're really being honest about it, then you're going to think of major blowups you had with those people. You're going to think of times you stormed out of the house. But you keep coming back because for the most part you will work off things in the big picture. You have to be careful not getting caught up in the moment too much.
Can media coverage have a corrosive impact on a team?
The media's job is different than ours. Let's put it this way: The media can certainly be a challenge. You're out looking for stories. And that's your job. And for a lot of people, maybe not a lot, but for a few people, the easiest way is to look for the negative.
The whole world has different challenges now with the 24-hour news cycle and just the volume of stuff that's out there. And everybody has to get out there. So you've got all these people now, because it's online 24 hours, if I want to get noticed, I got to have something different. And so the beat reporter writes his story and the team played well and blah blah blah. Well, I can't write that same story now. Nobody's going to read it.
So every angle is going to be covered. Every angle. That's not just in sports. That's in everything. It certainly presents a challenge, but I don't think that that's something you can blame on the media. I think coaches sometimes look at the media as the enemy. I don't think that's fair. It's going to be like any profession. Ninety-nine percent of the people are going to work hard and just try to do a good job. And you're going to find that 1 percent that lacks integrity, will trump up stories, won't be honest, but there's so few of them. I never wanted to look at the media as an enemy, I never wanted my players to look at the media as an enemy.
Do coaches get frustrated by media ignorance of strategy and details?
I never really got that frustrated by that. You have to realize that their level of knowledge is not going to be what a coach's is. The criticism from the media never really bothered me. I'd correct it when I can, but that's their job. If stuff wasn't personal, then it really didn't bother me.
I'm sure I've pissed off everybody I've ever met one way or another. And whether they like me or not, I hope they're at least basing it on the whole picture.
Is watching the NBA more fun now that you’re not coaching?
I would say I probably enjoyed it more when I was coaching because I was more specifically looking at it in terms of, "Wow, that would be good for our team" if I was just watching another game or, "When do we play that team? We're going to have to do this." I enjoyed the deeper analysis more than I enjoy just sitting down and watching a game.
I enjoyed how I watched the games as a coach more than I do how I watch games now.
Why do you respect (Tampa Bay Rays manager) Joe Maddon so much?
He is very analytical in what he does. Is there any way he can gain an advantage with his shifts, probably the most obvious one, or squeeze bunting? He's not afraid to go against the book. He's not managing worried about what might be said if something doesn't work. He's going to analyze situations and go with what he thinks gives his team the best chance to succeed in that situation and not worry about the possible repercussions. And to me, that's the biggest thing to learn.
Does the fear of criticism stifle coaching creativity?
I don't think what would hold me back or hold a lot of coaches back, being worried about what people are going to say. I think it's that I trend toward wanting to go with the tried and true. Something where, I've seen this work. I know this succeeds in the NBA. That's what I want to do.
I know that these principles that we have work and we're going to stick to those. I just go with what I have seen work. I certainly would not call myself creative. There are other coaches who are innovative and everything else. I wouldn't be that guy, that's for sure.
I'd certainly seen four shooters around a big guy work before. So that might not have been the conventional way everybody was doing it, but number one, I had seen it work, and number two, it was certainly what fit our team the best. It might not have been at the time, in 2007, conventional, but I wouldn't say that it was innovative in any way. People had done it. But you can go back to Robert Horry playing the 4 and Matt Bullard [in Houston]. Maybe I was doing it differently than a majority of the league, but it wasn't new.
Who are the most innovative coaches, in your opinion?
Mike D'Antoni might be the closest to someone who's doing something really differently among coaches in our league.
Gregg Popovich was the first guy I know who, and he still does it more than anybody, resting players the way he does over the long haul. There’s still not people who do it like he does. I don't think I would ever do it that way. But he's done it with great success. That's an innovation I guess. In the Xs and Os, there are so few things that you see and say, "Wow, I've never seen that before."
How do you feel about reducing minutes?
It's sort of in all sports now. You look at baseball and pitchers have gone from a four-man rotation to a five-man rotation and pitch counts and all of that. And if you're a guy in the NBA who plays your players 38, 40 minutes a night, the media's going to beat you up for it. That's always been a curious thing to me, because, number one, so many people in the media who'll beat coaches up for things supposedly have this analytical background, but I haven't seen them come out with one thing that indicates that, you know what, if guys play this many minutes then they get hurt less than guys who play this many minutes. I haven't seen any of that so that's curious that they've sort of accepted the value of playing guys fewer minutes over the course of the year.
The second thing that's curious, could be in all sports is supposedly now, if we go back 30 or 40 years, maybe only 20. Supposedly now, our athletes are better, they're bigger, stronger faster athletes.
We've got better training, OK. We've got better nutrition. We've got all this technology. Our travel is a lot better. They're not traveling commercial. Everything is set up better, and yet, they're not capable of playing the minutes or pitching the innings that guys did 30 or 40 years ago! I don't get that. And it's not like players are hurt less now than players in those years. Those guys used to play every day. They played 82 games, they played 40 minutes a game. Now, supposedly all these great improvements we made, our athletes aren't capable of doing that.
The media is not privy to what goes on in practice. So, the media assumes that the only thing that matters in the balance between rest and work is, “How many minutes a guy plays in a game.” Well, to me, and I'm not saying this happens, but let's say a guy only averages 32 minutes a game but that coach practices really hard on the days in between. To me, that guy is going to be potentially more fatigued than a guy who plays 38 minutes a game but gets rest on the days in between.
Every coach in every sport, one of their larger concerns is the balance between work and rest. We all think about it all the time. So, to think about it is good. But for people to pretend, again, if you want to do it and you want to figure it out and you want to show me that, throwing 200 innings a year instead of 300 that they used to throw will prolong careers, well show me that. If you want to show me that playing 30 minutes a game will prolong someone's career over playing 36 minutes a game, well show me that.
One of the knocks when I was working for Pat Riley was, "Oh, his practices were so hard. You go to him, it's going to shorten your career." Then I look around and say, well, Patrick Ewing played a damn long time. Charles Oakley played a damn long time. And Derek Harper played in his 30s and played a long time. And Mo Cheeks. And it's, "C'mon!" Where's the evidence of this?
That this work is shortening careers. And then you get these things like, Stephen Strasburg can only throw 160 innings last year. And I'm sitting there going, "Really? Where did you come up with that number?" Maybe 165? Maybe he should have thrown only 140? You guessed it! Come on, you guessed it! The hope is, that fewer innings means fewer problems and it will help him in the long run. But, they don't know and they had a great chance last year. Sitting him down certainly decreased their chances. And they're not even going to get in (the playoffs) this year. Maybe they wasted the only chance they're going to have.
Everybody is in a different situation. Gregg Popovich has had great players. So Gregg Popovich goes into the season knowing he's going to make the playoffs. And so, he can rest guys throughout the years. Well, if you're Mark Jackson and the Warriors or you know, you're the Dallas Mavericks last year. You've got no guarantees.
I think the most frustrating thing for a coach is those kind of things. Where you're being criticized for things that have no basis in reality. They're simply just opinions. We all got into this on the NBA level knowing, fairly or unfairly, we were going to be judged by winning and losing. And that's OK. But now you're Tom Thibodeau and you're winning. And you're still being judged because you're playing guys too much.
My brother's always asked the question: Does the human body really know the difference? Are you really more fatigued after having played 38 minutes over 36 minutes? Over the course of the year you're talking about, let's say it's 40 minutes over 36. You're talking over the course of five and a half months, a difference of 328 minutes on your body. Over five and a half months. Are you telling me there's an appreciable difference in fatigue at the point? I'm not buying that. But people just accept it.
There are some people, some strength and conditioning coaches that are on the cutting edge. Those people, they're zeroing in on it. Not on a number of minutes, but actually on good measurements of the human body to determine when guys are fatigued and when they're not. And that's the key point. I don't care about how many minutes you play. It could have been only 18 minutes. Maybe the guy's worn down or whatever, or he's not getting enough sleep. Right now, he's fatigued and needs rest. That is helpful information to a coach. Or to anybody running a team.
So your Magic teams adopted a distinct, spread-floor strategy. How did you come by it?
The plan -- not just my plan but [GM] Otis Smith's plan -- was that, when you have Dwight Howard, he's the centerpiece of your team. What you always want to do is take your best players and figure out how to complement them and the best way to help a big guy like that is to get him room on the floor. And you do that by putting as much shooting out there as possible.
When we looked at guys -- I mean they drafted [J.J.] Redick -- shooting was always a priority. And then what happened in that first year the same summer that I came here. Then we got Rashard [Lewis] and [Hedo Turkoglu] who are both 3-men, but clearly among their top four players [at their position], along with Jameer [Nelson], so they obviously were going to have to play together.
So one of them had to become a 4-man. Rashard was just a better fit at the 4. Look, if Tony Battie had not gotten hurt that year, there's a good chance that we would have played big at least half the game and not been quite as much four-out. With the roster we had, it was just an absolute necessity that we played the way we did. And I thought the shooting around Dwight really helped. The thought was always trying to put guys around Dwight that complemented him.
Is concocting NBA strategy actually fun? Coaches are so famously miserable.
I really enjoyed that part of the job. Sitting around with your staff, and kicking around ideas and looking at different things and trying to find the best way to make it work for your team. I find that to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the job, to think about those things and really, really try to make it fit and make it all work.
What aspect of what you did strategically were you most proud of?
There's a fairly small group of guys who are just going to be successful wherever they go and in whatever system they're in. I mean, they're just so talented or so versatile or whatever it is that, wherever you put them, they're really going to be successful. But I think a great majority of the league and probably some guys that are in and out of the league, it really comes down to getting in a place where you fit what's going on. So my first year here, we had Keith Bogans and Mo Evans splitting time as the starting 2. And they were both really successful. Courtney Lee started as a rookie the next year on a team that goes to the NBA Finals.
If you want them to do things that aren't really going to fit their strengths, then they're not going to be as good. And I think that's why some teams don't like a guy because he doesn't really fit what they're trying to do. And then he goes somewhere else and plays well and people’s first reaction is, "Team A made a bad trade in giving the guy up!"
Well, maybe not. He didn't really fit what they were doing. I think that fit is so important for, I don't know what percentage, 80 percent of the players in the league.
Did the rule changes in the early 2000s change the league a lot?
Coaches are going to adapt to whatever the rules are. The rules certainly change strategy. Even within that, even since that happened, things continue to evolve. People are always trying to find a different way.
One of the big ones that's changed a lot, even more than the illegal defense rules, is what you're able to do with your hands out on the perimeter guarding people. Your team defense became a lot better because it's becomes a lot harder individually to guard guys.
I remember when we had Dan Majerle when I was an assistant in Miami, and Dan, at that part of his career anyway, wasn't the quickest guy in the world but he could certainly move his feet. He was a real, real tough guy, and very committed. But with his strength, and under the rules at the time where you could put a forearm on the guy, Dan could really reroute guys and things like that. And that rule changed. To me, that probably changed NBA defenses.
Look, I mean, I've only been in the league 18 years. I mean, you can go back and talk to guys who were in it a long time ago. But the time I've been in [the forearm rule] changed NBA defense and NBA defensive strategy more than the illegal defense guidelines.
Do the rules have something to do with why centers are less involved offensively?
They've certainly become a lesser part of NBA offense. Now, the reason. I think there's multiple reasons. Most kids growing up don't want to play in there. It's not a lot of fun. There’s a lot of contact. You’re not handling the ball. You’re not getting to shoot it with range. That’s number one. The other reason, there’s just not enough people feeding into the NBA who are low-post players who want to do that work.
It’s always been a defended position. A guard can just sort of get the ball and get himself a shot. A center needs his teammates to bring the ball down into him.
Passing as a skill really hasn't gotten much better. A lot of coaches actually think it's gotten worse, and so that makes it harder to get guys the ball. Certainly the defensive rules have allowed us to do things that we previously couldn't do to make it harder on post people.
I mean, you can front the post and bring another guy over behind him. You could never do that kind of stuff before. Certainly the rules have contributed to that. And I also think, you combine the rules with now, how are you still going to be able to get the ball inside because you don't have a rule that artificially gets your post guy some room? That’s also led to putting more shooting on the floor, and teams playing smaller, because the only way now to prevent teams from doing those kinds of things is to put enough shooting on the floor to get those guys space.
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