ATLANTA – Stan Van Gundy hasn’t advocated over the years for fewer NBA preseason games because he’d like more time to golf – he doesn’t golf – or to provide more of a break for his players. He just finds it easier to accomplish what’s required to get the Pistons ready for the regular season with a mix that tilts more to practice and less to games.
And he’s helped start the process to change the equation.
At the annual NBA coaches meeting, held in early September in Chicago, he and others discussed some alternatives to better use their time in the four weeks between the opening of training camp and the regular season tipoff.
“I would love to see an arrangement where at 11 o’clock today or 1 o’clock or whatever, Mike (Budenholzer, Atlanta Hawks coach) and I could each take the guys who weren’t going to play tonight in the game and play them in here,” Van Gundy said after Thursday’s shootaround for that night’s game between the Pistons and Hawks.
“Go two quarters in here where we could play them, coach them, evaluate them and then come back tonight with the other guys. I’d love to do that.”
Van Gundy values practice time for a number of reasons, but the big one is pretty straightforward.
“For one thing, everybody can practice. You’ve got 10 guys on the floor instead of five,” he said. “It’s not that I value it more (than preseason games); I don’t. The games are very, very important. I just think six is plenty.”
The Pistons play six preseason games this season, down from the customary eight they played last year and in most preseasons. Most NBA teams have also reduced the number of preseason games they play.
“I wouldn’t fight them going to fewer, but six is fine,” he said. “If we stay in this arrangement with the same amount of time (between the opening of camp and the regular season’s start), we’ll probably go with six. I think for the players, fewer than six would probably be tough, too, because it’s too many practices. They need to play. So unless they shortened preseason, I think six is pretty good.”
The coaches batted around some other ideas, Van Gundy said.
“We mentioned some ideas, wanted to have the freedom to scrimmage people as two of the eight (allowable preseason games) that we have. If we go into a scrimmage situation, Mike and I, just in a practice gym, we could play eight quarters, 10 quarters, or play six quarters and then work on certain situations. You could get a lot done. The league won’t allow that at this point, but it is something they’re willing to think about and talk about. So that’s my thing. I love playing against other teams, having to face different situations. It’s just your limited in the number of minutes (to parcel out to players fighting for rotation roles or roster spots).”
No votes were taken, but Van Gundy senses that the ideas were well received by NBA coaches.
“It’s the first year anybody’s talked about it, but it seems pretty popular among coaches,” he said. “Again, we could give a lot of people time. Even guys like Trey Freeman and Nik Jovanovic, who haven’t gotten any time and probably won’t in the preseason, in a situation like that you could give them a chance to play some minutes. Minutes wouldn’t be a zero-sum game. If you get them, somebody else doesn’t. You could do both. But that’s just not the way it is right now.”
Freeman and Jovanovic went undrafted last June and signed contracts to participate in training camp with the Pistons. They’ll be assigned to Grand Rapids, the Pistons’ D-League affiliate, as designated “affiliate players” if they go unclaimed by another NBA team when the Pistons waive them before the start of the regular season.
Teams typically bring a couple and up to as many as five players with little chance to stick on their roster – training camp rosters are capped at 20, five above the regular-season limit – to camp to provide depth for training camp two-a-day practices but also as a way to get a longer look at players in whom they have interest.
Van Gundy said enacting some of the ideas the coaches discussed in Chicago likely would have to be collectively bargained.
In the meantime, Van Gundy will continue making the most of every training camp practice but also every preseason game, which he values for, among other things, raising the competitive juices of his players.
“And you get to see different people and different things and defend different situations,” he said. “I think that’s all good. If we could do six or eight quarters, that would be great. And that would be better than what we can get in practice. It’s just that trying to find minutes for everybody is the problem.”