JVG is one of my favorite sports analysts working on television today, or at any other time for that matter. He’s knowledgeable, honest, neurotic, funny, and sarcastic. All perfectly good reasons, of course, for people within basketball to loathe him.
The list of folks he’s managed to anger this season is long, but don’t expect that to stop him from telling it like it is.
The NY Daily News has more:
Jeff Van Gundy once called Michael Jordan a con man and said it again the next day just in case someone didn’t hear him. And this was before Van Gundy was paid for his opinions. If you’re willing to go there and live with the consequences, should anyone really be surprised that this season alone Van Gundy – the obsessed head coach turned engaging television analyst – has managed to upset the Knicks, the Phoenix Suns and even most of college basketball for having the audacity to question whether Davidson’s Stephen Curry can be a starting-caliber NBA point guard?
[David] Lee felt that Van Gundy took his comment out of context but also acknowledged that Van Gundy, like Charles Barkley, makes for good television because he’s entertaining and provocative. After the Suns fired Terry Porter, Van Gundy criticized Steve Nash and Grant Hill for, in his mind, failing to support their coach. The Phoenix Suns’ organization was so angered, it demanded an apology. The Suns didn’t get one.
“I know that not everybody agrees with everything I say,” Van Gundy said Thursday by phone. “ESPN probably has problems with my tangents even though I don’t know when I’m tangent-ing. I try to be fair and objective. I try to say what I think. But hey, I didn’t always agree with everything that was said or written about my teams.”
In an awesome twist of fate, the horror show that is otherwise known as the New York Knicks will make its national television debut in Orlando tonight.
And guess whose job it is to tell the home viewer what he thinks of their play?
