NBA players and coaches balance each other out incredibly well: most players have found success because of their confidence in themselves and their team, and most coaches have found success because of their bottomless desire to nitpick and fine-tune. It’s the yin and yang that makes professional sports go.
Stan Van Gundy may be a more extreme example of the coaching norm; rarely if ever does SVG publicly praise the Magic for their play, and the players in Orlando indicate its more of the same in the locker room. Van Gundy is obsessive and almost neurotic in his perfectionism, and those very traits that make him such a terrific coach also make him quite the Negative Nancy.
Last night was a rare exception. Van Gundy congratulated his players on their regular season performance, which seemed to throw a few of the Magic players for a loop. From Tania Ganguli of the Orlando Sentinel:
“That’s like once every blue moon, so we were in shock about his comments,” Lewis said. “It is the end of the season, he did congratulate us on everything we’ve done this year but now all that goes out the window it starts new.”
Said Dwight Howard: “Was it nice? A little bit. We tell him to trick us sometimes and tell him we’re doing something right.”
Said Barnes: “To get a pat on the back from Stan is like -- I don’t know what it’s like. It’s unheard of. But I think it’s great for this team. As loose as we are, we know when to play but Stan is that constant driving force, never satisfied. We got 59 wins out of it, we could have easily had 63, 64, 65 wins.”