Jeff Van Gundy still recalls one unmistakable sound from the Knicks’ last journey to the NBA Finals. Twenty-seven years later, he can hear the Madison Square Garden crowd chanting his name, and he can feel the goosebumps and the emotion that made his hand holding that Diet Coke tremble near the home bench.
Garden president Dave Checketts had admitted he was courting Phil Jackson to become the Knicks’ next coach, and the fans were not feeling it. So in the closing minutes of a second-round sweep of the Atlanta Hawks, they chanted, Jeff Van Gun-dee … Jeff Van Gun-dee, just as they would when the Knicks eliminated the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals.
“People always said New York is only a place to coach if you’re a star or celebrity, and from the first day in New York, I never felt that,” Van Gundy said. “I felt they were more attracted to the common man with a common upbringing, and I think that chant was really a nice recognition for someone trying to do his job.
“Very few things I remember without having my memory jogged from that part of my life, because the games and seasons run together. But that chant is something I will never forget. I don’t think the people there that night understood what that meant to my family and me.”
Van Gundy, 64, covered 15 NBA Finals as a broadcaster for ESPN and is now an assistant with the Los Angeles Clippers. He is reportedly a candidate for open head-coaching positions with the Orlando Magic and Portland Trail Blazers. But on a certain level, Van Gundy will always be a Knicks lifer who regrets resigning from the team a quarter century ago and who was interested in his old job when David Fizdale and Tom Thibodeau were hired instead.
Of course, Van Gundy has watched the Knicks’ staggering run to their first finals appearance since 1999, punctuated by their sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers and their 11th consecutive playoff win. Of course, he has strong feelings about what he has seen from Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns & Co.
“To win that many in a row in dominant fashion, to me, the Knicks are the favorite now to win it all,” Van Gundy said. “They are playing that good, they’re healthy and everything is going great for them.
“You can say, well, Atlanta this and Philly and Cleveland that, but when you win road playoff games by 50, and you’re kicking ass and taking names, anybody who tries to diminish that is wrong. This is the greatest playoff run in Knicks history. They still have to win it, but there’s never been a Knicks team this dominant. They are just waylaying people.”
Van Gundy doesn’t want to discuss the coaching component of what’s unfolded here because Thibodeau was his trusted assistant in New York and remains a close friend. Thibs didn’t deserve to be fired after making the Knicks relevant again, including leading them last year to their first conference finals appearance since 2000.
But as it turned out, owner James Dolan and team president Leon Rose found a more flexible and collaborative option in Mike Brown, who has done tremendous work in taking the Knicks, as they say, to the next level.
The Knicks surround coach Mike Brown after winning the Eastern Conference finals. (Jason Miller / Getty Images)
Like every veteran coach, Van Gundy has his own haunting set of what-ifs. He was an assistant on Pat Riley’s top-seeded, 60-win Knicks team in 1993 that had a 2-0 conference finals lead over Michael Jordan’s Bulls before losing it. Van Gundy was back again with Riley the following year, when they were one victory away from the franchise’s first championship since 1973, and couldn’t close out the Houston Rockets.
Van Gundy’s own 57-win team in 1997 — “a great team, not a good team,” he said — was KO’d in the conference semis by the league’s absurd suspensions of five Knicks, including Patrick Ewing and three others for leaving the bench in a Game 5 brawl with the Miami Heat. In 2000, with the conference finals series even, Van Gundy’s team blew an early 18-point lead over Indiana in Game 5 and couldn’t recover.
But 1999 — following a lockout-shortened 50-game season — was the most memorable of Van Gundy’s six straight trips to the playoffs as head coach. After Checketts fired general manager Ernie Grunfeld over dinner, Van Gundy saved himself by (barely) making the playoffs, beating top-seeded Miami on Allan Houston’s shot in the final seconds of Game 5, and then sweeping Atlanta while the Jackson drama raged around him.
“Hey Phil, we already have a coach,” read one sign in the Garden. Yes, Van Gundy saw it.
The Indiana series has been the highlight of his career. On the same day that the Mets were facing the Yankees and Charismatic was going for the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes, Larry Johnson’s epic four-point play in the final seconds to win Game 3 was the ultimate New York story, and a sign that the Knicks might yet win it all after Ewing tore his Achilles in Game 2.
Allan Houston sent the Knicks to the finals by dominating nemesis Reggie Miller in Game 6, scoring 32 points on 12-of-17 shooting to Miller’s 8 points on 3-of-18 shooting. Houston calmed himself all night by thinking of his expecting wife and the blessings of fatherhood.
At the horn, as the leader of the first eighth seed to advance to the finals, Van Gundy walked onto the floor, pumping his fists and shouting, “Yes! Yes!” He crossed midcourt and wrapped Houston in a bear hug.
“That was my Jimmy Valvano moment,” Van Gundy said later.
Among the Knicks celebrating on the court was a reserve guard named Rick Brunson, whose two-year-old son Jalen was somewhere in the arena.
Jeff Van Gundy speaks with Larry Johnson during the 1999 NBA Finals. (Robert Sullivan / AFP via Getty Images)
The Knicks met the San Antonio Spurs in the finals as clear underdogs. Ewing was out, Johnson was hindered by a knee sprain suffered in Game 6 against Indiana, and the Spurs were in the first hours of a championship program anchored by Tim Duncan, David Robinson and Gregg Popovich.
“The Spurs were the best team the whole season,” Van Gundy said. “They were dominant. We would’ve been more competitive if we had Patrick, but the outcome would’ve remained the same.”
The Spurs won 12 straight playoff games that year, including the first two against New York. As the season started collapsing around the Knicks, the Garden shot clocks malfunctioned in Game 5, forcing the use of old-school clocks on the floor.
San Antonio’s Avery Johnson made a late corner jumper that the Knicks never answered, and that was that in the Spurs’ 78-77 clincher. Duncan finished with 31 points and nine rebounds in winning his first of five titles. Latrell Sprewell had 35 points and 10 rebounds, but the Knicks were held between 67 and 77 points for the third time in the series.
All these years later, maybe a Spurs-Knicks sequel is in the cards. Maybe not. Either way, from a distance, Van Gundy will enjoy the camera shots of the Knicks alums in the stands. His guys.
Ewing. Houston. Johnson. Sprewell. John Starks. Kurt Thomas.
“I love seeing them happy and seeing them together again,” Van Gundy said. “When I see the Knicks now, I don’t think about the games in the ’90s as much as I do the people who made it possible.”
The players. The coaches. And the fans who chanted his name the last time the Knicks played for the heavyweight championship of their sport.