The Ringer on the Stan van Gundy hire

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“They got eight guys on that team who have played a lot, who are 25 or younger. And they mix them with some veteran guys who are not only still really good players—Jrue Holiday, JJ Redick, Derrick Favors, E’Twaun Moore, and then [Nicolò] Melli, who comes in from Europe. So they’ve got a nice mix,” he told Zach Lowe. “I’m bullish on this team. This team is exciting. They’ve got a lot of options.”

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Most germane to the discussion of Van Gundy’s “abilities as a teacher with a young roster,” though—skills he’s honed over the years in shepherding the development of players like Dwyane Wade, Udonis Haslem, Dwight Howard, Jameer Nelson, and Redick, who recently credited Van Gundy as having “a bigger impact on [his] career than any coach [he’s] played for”—is his penchant for preparation, organization, and ensuring that his teams don’t screw up the small stuff.

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“To me, the areas for them are, they’ve got to take care of the ball—their turnovers actually went up in the time they had Zion, they were last in the league in the last 20 games,” Van Gundy told Lowe. “They’ve got to get committed to the defensive end of the floor. At some point, you’re going to have to do a better job getting back on defense, and you’re going to have to do a better job protecting the paint. Like, I just don’t know if you can build a good enough defense if you don’t do those two things. I think their personnel is good enough defensively. … The players are going to have to show a much greater sense of urgency at that end of the floor if they’re going to get to where we think they can get.”

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Cleaning the Glass tracks a stat called “location effective field goal percentage,” which looks at all of the shots a team takes, and asks how efficiently its offense would operate if its players hit a league-average share of them. The idea is to take a snapshot of a team’s shot profile: How well are you doing at generating chances from the most efficient areas of the court (at the rim, from the charity stripe, in the short corners) that typically lead to the most effective and potent offenses? And, conversely, on the defensive side, how good a job are you doing at preventing those tasty looks? The worst showing ever for a Van Gundy defense came in 2014-15, his first season in Detroit; the Pistons still came in above league average, finishing 14th in opponents’ shot profile. His teams landed in the top 10 in every single other season, including eight top-fives and five no. 1 finishes—once in Miami, three times in Orlando, and once with Detroit.

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