Detroit Pistons head coach Stan Van Gundy is not a fan of instant replay, so much so that he would like to see it eliminated not only from basketball, but all sports.
Before the Pistons played the Brooklyn Nets on Monday, Van Gundy went on a rant about how he’s not a fan of the process, via The Brooklyn Game’s Devin Kharpertian:
“If it were up to me, in all of sports, we’d get rid of all of it,” Van Gundy said in a candid pre-game interview before taking on the Brooklyn Nets Monday evening. “I sort of came to that in my two years out of coaching, sitting and watching games, college and pro.
“It’s infuriating watching the game and watching the last two minutes take 20 minutes and stuff. You know, going to the monitor four times in the last two minutes, it’s like, ‘damn, can we just play this basketball game?’ So I whipped through two years of just sitting there as a spectator and absolutely hated it.”
Van Gundy also had issues with the standard logic of “getting the calls right” behind replay.
“I know the rationale is we want to get it right, but that’s only partially true anyway. Because we’re not reviewing foul calls and non-foul calls, which are the most important calls. We don’t care about getting those right. So why are we going to worry about the rest of it? I don’t — I don’t get it. We’ve selected certain calls at certain times in the games that we want to get right. And for the other 46 minutes of the game, and for certain calls in the last two minutes, I guess we don’t care if we get it right.”
He makes some good points as far as not being able to review certain calls compared to some, in addition to not being able to review other calls unless they come within a certain time period of the game.
Van Gundy is definitely on the older side of the argument here, and honestly, his wish will likely never come to fruition. But it is nice to see that Van Gundy is willing to speak his mind, no matter how unrealistic something might be.
Many coaches and players alike in the NBA are often shy to do so, but Van Gundy is not one of them.
