Jeff Van Gundy ‘enjoyed’ dealing with combative NBA media in New York

Jeff Van Gundy never looked like an NBA coach who enjoyed dealing with the New York media, but apparently, he did.

After avoiding the spotlight for most of the last year following his ESPN firing, Van Gundy has opened up in recent weeks about losing his announcing gig, rebounding with the Boston Celtics, and taking an assistant coaching job with the Los Angeles Clippers.

Van Gundy was recently a guest on SiriusXM NBA Radio’s morning show, which is hosted by Frank Isola and Brian Scalabrine. During the interview, Scalabrine asked the former Knicks head coach about dealing with Isola when he was a beat reporter with the New York Daily News.

“It was a little bit more contentious back then,” Van Gundy said of media interaction in the late ’90s and early 2000s. “Players were attacked, coaches were attacked, everybody was under attack, now it’s just coaches really…The daily interaction was – I found – was much more combative and actually, somewhat more enjoyable too.”

“I actually enjoyed the back and forth,” Van Gundy insisted. “To me, you either take it or you stand up for yourself. And you can’t do it in a defensive manner, but I think you have to try to stand up for yourself and tell your thought process of why you did what you did. You have to have a couple of stock lines. Mine were, ‘We have more than enough to win with’ and ‘I did what I thought was in the best interest of the team.’ And if you keep repeating those enough, they get bored, and they stop asking you.”

Isola noted that Van Gundy was good at using the media to his advantage by educating reporters about the sport and the players, which allowed him to coach the team through the media at times.

“If you have a great, great player who’s taking unjust criticism, you have to try to quell that,” Van Gundy said, speaking mainly about Patrick Ewing, who was criticized as much, if not more, than any superstar athlete in New York. “No matter what people say about, ‘I don’t read the media, I don’t know what everybody’s saying,’ that is an out-and-out lie. Because there are so many people in your life who make sure that you know the bad stuff that’s being written about you.”

Van Gundy then explained that as a head coach, you owe it to your players, especially your best player, like Ewing, to defend them from media criticism.

“As much as I owed him for my success or whatever success I’ve had…like truly, he paid my mortgage,” Van Gundy said of Ewing. “He’s still paying it. The guy is a phenomenal figure in my life.”

A longtime assistant with the Knicks, Van Gundy was named interim head coach after Don Nelson was fired midseason in 1996. Van Gundy closed out the season with a 13-10 record and a second-round playoff exit, prompting Isola’s Daily News to give him 50 million to 1 odds of retaining the position. Ewing eventually vouched for Van Gundy and helped him become the permanent head coaching job with the Knicks, against all odds. Because of that, Van Gundy said defending Ewing was always easy.

“The more challenging ones are not to get into the comparisons between players and making sure everyone knows how important they are to your overall success,” Van Gundy added.

Maybe Van Gundy enjoyed his dealings with the media so much that it drove him to have a successful analyst career. After resigning from the Knicks job, Van Gundy joined TNT as an analyst during the 2002-03 season. And after he was fired by the Houston Rockets in 2007, Van Gundy jumpstarted a 16-year tenure as a broadcaster with ESPN. After a 17-year lull, Van Gundy returned to the NBA sidelines as an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Clippers. But he won’t have to deal with the media too much in Los Angeles, leaving that responsibility for Ty Lue.

[SiriusXM NBA Radio]