In the past, Stan Van Gundy has come across as a bit of a whiner. When the 2009-10 schedule came out, he complained the schedule-makers hadn’t shown the Magic, runners-up to the Lakers the previous season, enough “respect,” even though only one other team (the Cavaliers) would appear on national television more often. He was upset in part because the league opted against a Lakers-Magic Finals rematch on Christmas, instead slotting Magic-Celtics in the early afternoon, which apparently made Van Gundy feel the league was treating his team like an opening act no one really cared about.

But when Christmas 2009 arrived, Van Gundy complained about playing on Christmas at all, suggesting the league should give everyone the day off. He played the disrespect card repeatedly throughout 2009 and 2010, claiming in various interviews that media didn’t “respect” the Magic, Dwight Howard’s MVP candidacy or the general art of defense.

A couple of years later, Van Gundy still has lots of curmudgeon in him, but he has morphed into a national basketball treasure — a funny guy whose complaints come with a smirk and are usually much more justified and specific than his “disrespect” rants of prior seasons.

PHOTOS: THE MANY ANGERED FACES OF VAN GUNDY

Witness, for instance, his glorious riff on the Toronto crowd’s reaction Monday night to a last-second Ed Davis basket that got the Raptors to 100 points — and earned every fan a free slice of pizza. The crowd went crazy, even though Davis’ basket and subsequent foul shot cut the Magic’s lead to 16 points. Van Gundy’s routine:

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Mike D'Antoni resigned as coach of the Knicks after three-plus seasons and a 121-167 record. (Andrew Gobmert/Landov)

It’s a stunning move, particularly for a coach who understands that building a successful basketball team requires time, practice, luck and chemistry: Mike D’Antoni has resigned as coach of the Knicks after three-plus seasons in which he coached approximately 27 versions of the Knicks. The last of those was the most promising, with the emergence of a productive point guard celebrity in Jeremy Lin, surrounded by two allegedly top-shelf scorers and a dominating defensive center who doubled as a pick-and-roll finisher supreme.

That version of the Knicks lasted 10 games, losing eight, before D’Antoni apparently decided he had had enough of the mess a whole bunch of factors conspired to create. His resignation comes amid a classic New York day of anonymous back-biting, with sources close to the team leaking all manner of controversy to the city’s three main news outlets: that Carmelo Anthony, whose return from injury marked the start of that fatal 2-8 stretch, had requested a trade after Monday’s loss in Chicago; that D’Antoni had lost control of the locker room, whatever that really means; and that Anthony had alienated his teammates by breaking from D’Antoni’s offense, screwing up New York’s spacing, calling his own number and (more often than not) missing bad shots.

The Knicks failed across the board over those 10 games. Their offense, terrible all season, mostly sputtered. The Knicks rank 23rd overall in points per possession, and even at the height of Melo-less Lin craze, they were scoring only at an average rate against a weak schedule. Their defense, ranked a very strong 10th overall in points allowed per possession, was even stingier without Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire around, and it carried the Knicks during the blissful seven-game winning streak that captivated the world. That defense has predictably regressed upon the return of one lazy defender (Anthony) and one willing but powerless one (Stoudemire); the Knicks have allowed a points per possession mark worse than the league’s 30th-ranked defense (New Jersey) in each of their last four games, though two of those came with Tyson Chandler sitting due to injury. Read More…

I’ve pleaded before for coaches to stop stepping onto the court, which is supposed to result in a technical foul, at least by the letter of the NBA rulebook. This is one of many stickler rules the officials justifiably ignore, since for the most part, coaches intrude onto the court when there is no action nearby — usually to get one step closer to their point guard as he brings the ball up toward midcourt. No harm, no foul, no technical merited. Things are different when coaches intrude along the sideline when play is unfolding on their end of the court, as Scott Skiles did last season in bumping Miami’s Carlos Arroyo in one of the clips in the post linked above.

Vinny Del Negro committed two ill-mannered coaching sins on Monday night when Golden State’s Brandon Rush hit a go-ahead three in the Warriors’ close win over the Clippers. Del Negro stepped onto the court, but that’s not what stood out to me, as you’ll see in the game’s highlights:

He obviously tried to distract Rush during the shooting motion. He stamps his foot onto the court just behind Rush and clearly yells and/or yaps in Rush’s ear during the shot release.

Del Negro is not the only coach to commit this offense. You’ll  occasionally catch an assistant, seated along the bench someplace, screaming in the general direction of an opposing shooter. Players on the bench do it all the time.

Players on the bench are also largely young men in their 20s and early 30s, taking an in-game break from combat both fun and ultra-competitive. Del Negro is a 45-year-old man who wears suits to work and instructs much younger players. Maybe I’m being an old fuddy-duddy, though I’m more than a decade younger than Del Negro, but I find this somewhere between lame and distasteful. I’m not calling for a technical on Del Negro here, though the rules explicitly do. I guess I just want a certain degree of professionalism from NBA head coaches, and the assistants, too. Read More…

The Wizards parted ways with Flip Saunders after a 2-15 start. (Chris Szagola/Cal Sport Media)

• Flip Saunders, hired in 2009 to coach a veteran team on the (alleged) cusp of something, has been fired after a disastrous start in Washington. Sean Fagan, writing at Bullets Forever, on the links between the dismissals of Eddie Jordan (in 2008) and Saunders:

However, one salient point gets lost amidst all the chatter: neither coach was ever given the tools to succeed at his profession. Despite all the criticism that Jordan received for not playing his youngsters, he ran a complicated system that necessitated the drafting of players with high basketball IQ who could come in and contribute immediately. Instead, Jordan was supplied with a series of long shot projects and low-IQ players who needed excessive amounts of development on what was at the time a veteran team. How Jordan was supposed to develop Andray Blatche and Nick Young while also keeping the team competitive within his system of play would eventually (along with the injury to Gilbert Arenas) prove his undoing. Bones were thrown to Jordan by supplying him with Antonio Daniels and Darius Songalia, but neither an impact player nor a draftee with a high-IQ pedigree was ever supplied. Instead, “we got buckets, son.”

Ownership has changed, but this same lesson has borne out with Saunders.

• The final lasting image of Saunders in Washington, found in the video clip at the bottom of this post, is fitting: Saunders, bashing his clipboard on the ground after Brandon Bass outworked Andray Blatche for a rebound.

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Erik Spoelstra endured unfair criticism from within the team and out early last season, despite leading Miami's Big Three to the Finals. (Hans Deryk/Reuters)

There was some confusion during the lockout about why the Heat, so close to a title in the Big Three’s first year together, hadn’t rewarded Erik Spoelstra with a contract extension. They rectified that today, as Pat Riley announced the team had signed Spoelstra to a new deal and assured media he would “never” have let Spoelstra hang this season as a lame duck.

This is well-deserved. Spoelstra endured unfair criticism from within and out early last season. LeBron James complained about playing too many minutes, said former Jazz coach Jerry Sloan sniffed out Spoelstra’s play-calling in an epic early season loss to Utah and then shoulder-checked Spoelstra in what now looks like an overhyped accident. Spoelstra endured endless rumblings about how Riley might fire him amid Miami’s 9-8 start. The star pieces didn’t mesh well immediately; why was Dwyane Wade just standing in the corner as LeBron handled the ball up top?

Spoelstra preached patience, and by the end of the season, the Heat were nearly good enough to be NBA champions. They weren’t perfect, and they won’t be when this season starts, either. Miami’s offense in the playoffs still went through static stretches lacking in creativity or movement, and Wade (or LeBron) would occasionally be content to stand in the corner as a glorified James Jones, while the other worked a pick-and-roll with Chris Bosh up top. But those stretches never happened immediately after a timeout, when Spolestra had the ears of his team and the ability to draw up a couple of motion-heavy plays that would get all three stars moving. Read More…

In six seasons in Atlanta, Mike Woodson helped the Hawks go from being one of the worst defensive teams in the league to a borderline top-10 squad (Icon SMI)

Mike Woodson wasn’t a defensive miracle worker in Atlanta, but he won’t have to be in New York, where the Knicks have hired him as Mike D’Antoni’s designated defensive coordinator. In six years as Atlanta’s head coach, Woodson turned the Hawks from one of the league’s worst defensive teams into a borderline top-10 outfit that peaked, in 2008-09, to sit 11th in the league’s points allowed per possession rankings.

The Hawks’ improvement hasn’t moved Woodson to the ranks of Tom Thibodeau or Dwane Casey in terms of turning so-so defenses into top-five monsters. Still, that improvement in Atlanta was huge, even if it coincided with the maturation of Josh Smith and the drafting of Al Horford — a pair of mobile bigs that served as the foundation for much of what Woodson did with the Hawks’ defense. As players developed and personnel improved, Atlanta became consistently good at two things it was terrible at when Woodson first arrived: defending the three and avoiding fouls. That kind of consistent, category-specific improvement stems from a coach’s philosophy: Orlando or New York attempt a ton of threes because their coaches believe it is more efficient to play that way. The Knicks were among the league’s worst last season at both defending threes and fouling, and lifting them toward the league average in those categories would be huge.

The Knicks don’t need to be the Celtics or the Bulls, though that would be helpful. The team’s offense, given more time for Carmelo Antony and Amar’e Stoudemire to mesh, should be potent enough. The very best of D’Antoni’s Phoenix teams — the 2004-05 and 2006-07 versions — proved you can build a legit title contender around a dynamite offense and an average defense. The armchair clichés paint those Suns teams as defensive sieves, but that doesn’t stand up; Phoenix ranked 17th in points allowed per possession in 2004-05 and 13th in 2006-07, and they managed that while playing in a superior conference. And if not for a few unlucky breaks — Joe Johnson’s injury in the 2005 playoffs, the infamous 2007 suspensions against San Antonio — one of those Phoenix teams could well have won a ring.

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Guard Jamal Crawford and the Hawks have hit the skids. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

• With Tuesday’s overtime loss at New Jersey, the Hawks are 8-7 after starting 5-0. Bret LaGree of Hoopinion says it’s time for Larry Drew to reconsider playing Jamal Crawford and Mike Bibby together, since their skills overlap so much. Also: introducing the Horford Treatment and the Pachulia Corollary, the latter of which sounds like an addendum to some early 20th-century treaty.

• Crawford reflects on his Seattle-area pal Nate Robinson in this Boston Globe article, which includes this choice tidbit from Crawford on Robinson’s style of play during summertime pick-up games:

“Nate’s a problem in the summer,’’ Crawford said. “Imagine him with no coach.’’

Truly terrifying.

• Also a concern for Atlanta: Are the Hawks slowly ditching the motion offense and reverting to Iso-Joe?

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Kobe Bryant found an unexpected mentor in Michael Jackson. (Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images)

• Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports has a must-read piece in which Kobe Bryant reveals that Bill Russell and Michael Jackson (yes, the late pop star) were crucial in helping him develop the work ethic it takes to reach the top. Kobe talks at length about each man and about what drives him, and it’s all interesting.

Perhaps my favorite detail, though, is the fact that Bryant wore a varsity-style Lakers jacket — with Larry O’Brien trophies patched on the back — to dinner with Wojnarowski. That is fantastic.

• Along the same lines: Kobe talked to ESPNChicago.com’s Nick Friedell about how Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau encouraged Bryant back in 1996, when Bryant was a suburban Philadelphia high school star who practiced now and then with the Sixers. (Thibodeau was an assistant to Sixers coach John Lucas at the time.)

• There were apparently some raised voices in the Miami locker room after Monday’s drubbing at the hands of the Pacers.

• The Heat’s thin bench is hurting them, which is one reason they reportedly waived Jerry Stackhouse in order to sign Erick Dampier to a veteran’s minimum contract.

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It's OK to feel bad for Greg Oden. Really. (Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images)

• I was hanging out with a friend recently when I saw a headline about news of Yao Ming’s latest injury and blurted out, “Man, poor Yao.” My friend chastised me, saying Yao has tens of millions of dollars and has gotten to play basketball for a living — hardly a pitiable existence. I protested, citing a bunch of studies that reportedly show money does little to change one’s happiness level, and that Yao, as a basketball player who can’t play, might actually be miserable.

Henry Abbott has a very similar discussion about Greg Oden, and argues that it’s OK to feel sorry for Oden despite his wealth.

• More thoughtful Oden talk from a Blazers blogger who writes about the therapeutic nature of supporting a team, regardless of how good that team is. There are hints in here that some Portland fans are moving slowly toward accepting the reality that the current Blazer era may have already been cut short.

• The Knicks are shooting a ton of three-pointers even though they have only one proven high-volume three-point shooter in their rotation (Danilo Gallinari). That has led at least two prominent Knicks beat writers to suggest that perhaps Eddy Curry and his low-post game have a place on this Knicks team. Mike Kurylo of Knickerblogger politely disagrees.

• Some wise, cautionary words for sportswriters looking for the alleged on-court implications of the Tony Parker-Eva Longoria divorce:

“A sober, thoughtful conversation does not mean we interpret every aspect of Parker’s play in light of recent events. Does the fact that he shot 9-of-14 from the field and led the team in scoring Wednesday night against the Chicago Bulls mean he’s shrugged off his marital difficulties and stayed focused on the game? Had he shot 2-of-14, would it mean he had allowed his off-the-court troubles to infect his game?

No, neither of those are conclusions we can make.”

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The Thunder entered the season with high expectations after their surprising 2009-10 campaign. (NBAE via Getty Images)

Much of the NBA world spent the weekend listing all of the things wrong with the Miami Heat, who are just 6-4 and have beat only one playoff contender. The Miami scrutiny is to be expected, even if the rush to condemn the experiment a failure — or even to speculate about its possible failure — is obviously premature. 

But there are two teams who deserve just as harsh an appraisal as the season hits the 10-game mark: the Orlando Magic and the Oklahoma City Thunder. One was seen as the league’s best young team, a popular choice to jump all the way to the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference and challenge the Lakers. The other was seen as perhaps the league’s only team in playoff form during the preseason. 

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