A few years ago, Stan Van Gundy was part of one of the best and most uncomfortable video-bombs in the history of sports when, while in the midst of telling a media scrum that his star big man Dwight Howard was trying to get him fired, lo-and-behold, here comes Dwight to put his arm around SVG like everything’s cool and in the process make the entire sports world recoil in disgust.
Sure enough, Van Gundy was dismissed from his coaching duties following the 2012 season, and Howard’s departure followed soon after. Fast-forward a few years, and Van Gundy now helms a burgeoning Detroit Pistons squad that was in Orlando Friday night to play his old team.
That just happened to coincide with the Magic’s induction of Shaquille O’Neal into the franchise’s Hall of Fame. You might recall that Shaq and SVG also share a somewhat checkered past stemming from their time together in Miami. Back in 2009, after a Magic game against the then-Suns center, Van Gundy accused his former big man of flopping. Shaq’s rejoinder was that Van Gundy was a “Master of Panic” when things got dicey in the playoffs, thus blessing him with one of the most hilarious and disrespectful nicknames ever bestowed on anyone.
Nonetheless, Van Gundy’s Pistons would go on to beat the Magic handily on Friday, and when Vince Ellis of the Detroit Free Press asked whether his former franchise might someday honor him in a similar fashion – being that he’s the team’s all-time winningest coach and the only coach to lead them to the Finals since the mid-90s – Van Gundy didn’t seem very optimistic, to say the least:
“There is no chance. Absolutely no chance,” Van Gundy said. “There’s just no chance. It’s just not the way things went down at the end. I guess if it were a whole different group of people here, possibly. But not with the current group — that ain’t happening.”
So there you have it. For his part, SVG seems at peace with his current job of getting a young but talented Pistons roster back to winning ways, and who knows, maybe one day he’ll finally get the credit he deserves for all of his successes in Orlando.
