Sports science can improve lots of things but a bad coach might not be one of them

Stan Van Gundy, coach of the NBA Detroit Pistons, is clueless about his own team. The damning assessment is the only logical conclusion based how he’s described his team as it loses game after game (currently 9 in a row). Last week he said the big problem was “energy” and then just yesterday after losing to the Lakers it was “dilemmas” which means that tomorrow it could be something else non-descript–maybe they’ll be “inattentive.”

This is an era of sports science and analytics and coaches don’t get to they don’t understand what is going on with their teams. Energy and dilemmas, to the extent that they are observable, are a function of players’ habits. The status of both are products of the way teams and players go about preparing for and then playing their games, something that a coach should be intimately involved with.

The Pistons’ athletic performance staff could tell Van Gundy about the physical state of their players and if the fatigue that underpins the lack of energy is physical, mental or both. It probably doesn’t help that Van Gundy appears to be morbidly obese and may not understand how healthy people function, let alone how athletic healthy people thrive playing a game they have enjoyed for most of their lives.

Nobody can tell Van Gundy, who is both coach and president of the team, that the status hierarchy has anyone but him as the alpha big cheese #1. Any sort of status-related dilemma under his watch has to be a failure of his communication, his leadership, his decision-making or some combination of the three.

Unlike Philadelphia which shows no sign of players improving, Detroit has seen pockets of sunshine. There have been scoring runs and good-size leads by lineups that seemed to function well. The tactic to use Greg Monroe as a key playmaker and distributor on offense has worked at times. (Last night for example, Monroe led a bench unit to solid 4th quarter after the Pistons had already fallen way behind.) The more central problem is the decline by Brandon Jennings and Josh Smith, players who contributed mostly misses and turnovers during the horrid 3rd quarter that preceded Monroe’s decent 4th quarter.

Improvement, if it is going to happen in Detroit, begins with the coach. The players and team will get better only if Van Gundy improves somehow.

So is there hope for basketball in Detroit when Van Gundy has a 5-year $35 million contract? Two of the best things I’ve seen I’ve read recently suggest the path lies in identifying strengths as a base to build upon and eventually develop excellence (from the UK Sports blog post, What shall we work on first, your strengths or your weaknesses?) and taking steps to make sure you don’t get worse (from James Clear, To Make Big Gains, Avoid Tiny Losses).

If positive change with the Pistons begins with the coach realizing some personal positive change, you have to assume there is some character strength that Stan Van Gundy possesses, some core insight or useful inter-personal attribute that can connect him and his team and begin the improvement process. Short of that progress is still possible if he can begin to identify the weaknesses in his process and shoring them up, something that would start with getting a clue about his team.

 

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