FanPost

Stan Van Gundy on the what led to his 4-1 offense with Orlando Magic

Douglas Jones-US PRESSWIRE

Editor's note: DBB reader Teal Stallion unearths a great interview about Stan Van Gundy and team construction.

With all the talk around here about whether or not Van Gundy is going to try to implement his floor-spreading offense around Drummond, I found this kind of interesting. From an old Q&A SVG did with ESPN:

So your Magic teams adopted a distinct, spread-floor strategy. How did you come by it?

"The plan -- not just my plan but [GM] Otis Smith's plan -- was that, when you have Dwight Howard, he's the centerpiece of your team. What you always want to do is take your best players and figure out how to complement them and the best way to help a big guy like that is to get him room on the floor. And you do that by putting as much shooting out there as possible.

When we looked at guys -- I mean they drafted [J.J.] Redick -- shooting was always a priority. And then what happened in that first year the same summer that I came here. Then we got Rashard [Lewis] and [Hedo Turkoglu] who are both 3-men, but clearly among their top four players [at their position], along with Jameer [Nelson], so they obviously were going to have to play together.

So one of them had to become a 4-man. Rashard was just a better fit at the 4. Look, if Tony Battie had not gotten hurt that year, there's a good chance that we would have played big at least half the game and not been quite as much four-out. With the roster we had, it was just an absolute necessity that we played the way we did. And I thought the shooting around Dwight really helped. The thought was always trying to put guys around Dwight that complemented him."

FanPosts are user-created posts from the Detroit Bad Boys community and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of all fans or the staff at DBB. The DBB staff reserves the right at any time to edit the contents of FanPosts as they reasonably see fit.