While the Houston Chronicle’s Johnathan Feigen suggests the Rockets’ inability to win without Tracy McGrady makes the MIA T-Mac an MVP candidate, the NY Post’s Peter Vescey is unimpressed with the way Jeff Van Gundy is coping with bad fortune.
Sounding very Larry Browntide-ish following his team’s seventh straight loss, Jeff Van Gundy podiumized the Rockets’ front line. For a minute straight, Houston’s Town Crier blanket indicted Yao Ming, Stromile Swift, Juwan Howard, et al., a half a dozen different ways for their alleged flagrant failure, game in and game out, to cover the pick and roll as per his faultless instructions.
Van Gundy, adding a page to Jim Bouton’s ageless book, “I managed good but, boy, did they play bad,” says he spends every waking hour trying to figure out how to get through to his imbecilic bigs regarding that particular defensive approach. This is just the latest working example, I submit, that infidelity has become the fastest spreading communicable disease. If there’s nothing holy within the Junior Mafia, if Lil’ Cease (above) had no compunction about turning on Lil’ Kim, and real life mafia members are turncoating every other trial, it’s no wonder coaches are giving up their players on an everyday basis.