For more than a year, Jeff Van Gundy has been coaching a group of lesser-known Americans for Team USA in tiny bandbox arenas in North, South and Latin America.
In Havana, he ate in one of the best restaurants on the island of Cuba, and learned from an American diplomat how folks with Ph.Ds sometimes work as maids in that impoverished economy. In Orlando, he bore witness to what happens when games in Puerto Rico are cancelled because of hurricanes and are relocated to cities in America at inopportune times.
“Thanksgiving night in Orlando last year, and we’re playing before a pretty small crowd. But Orlando has a pretty big Puerto Rican community, so there are something like 50 people there cheering for Team USA, and another 3,000 waving Puerto Rican flags and cheering for the other side.”
That story is a good one, but it is not the best one from the former head coach of the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets who now earns the lion’s share of his grocery money broadcasting games for ESPN and ABC.
He is also satisfying his coaching itch by guiding the squad of G-League players that is traveling to far-flung locales throughout the Western Hemisphere and playing before hostile audiences.
In Havana, Cuba, the Americans ate at a house-slash-restaurant that is the same establishment where former President Obama dined, and it was there that he ran into a U.S. consular official who explained the local economic dynamics, which were impacted for decades by the U.S. embargo, got a little better when Obama sat in the White House, but have worsened since President Trump re-instituted many of the old embargo rules.
“I’ve never quite seen as beautiful of a road as the Esplanade, which actually has almost no traffic, and there are police officers in booths at pretty much every intersection. Never seen anything like it,” Van Gundy said.
But what he saw in Cuba was nothing compared to what he saw from the Cubans in Santa Cruz, Calif., where the U.S.-soil half of the home-and-home was held.
“One guy bought a muffler. He actually bought a muffler that he was going to fly back to Cuba with. Other guys were buying flat-screen TVs. And after having been there, I get it.
“There’s no Best Buy, no Walmart, no Lowe’s,” Van Gundy told GetMoreSports.com in a telephone interview on Monday. “And it all starts to make sense. The consular official explained the economic conditions to me, like how there are people with Ph.Ds who have to work at night as maids in order to make ends meet.”
Team USA is trying to qualify for the 2019 World Cup in China, but because FIBA changed qualification rules to include games that take place during the NBA season, USA Basketball has been fielding a team of G-League players.
Van Gundy has traveled with them to Cordoba, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; Havana, Cuba; Mexico City, Mexico, and various points around the United States.
Qualification resumes in less than two months, and among those who will be wearing the red, white and blue are Larry Drew II, Reggie Hearn and Xavier Mumford, all of whom took part in Team USA’s two-day minicamp last week in Las Vegas with the heavier hitters on the Team USA roster.
Drew, Mumford and Hearn were with the team in the Cordoba airport after the Americans came back from a 20-point deficit to defeat an Argentina team that “completely outplayed us for almost the entirety of the game,” Van Gundy said.
Word reached them that they were going to miss their connecting flight in Buenos Aires, which is what spawned the event Van Gundy called the most cherished moment of his 14-month tenure.
“The guys started begging United Airlines on Twitter to hold the plane. We were going to have to claim our bags, re-check them to the United States, and go back through security … and there was a 20- or 30-minute gap that was going to make us miss our connecting flight,” Van Gundy said.
“And these guys, this group of 17 or 18 guys, they pulled it off. The job they did to get us on that second plane was more improbable than the 20-point comeback we pulled off against Argentina.”
Coaching under FIBA rules (many things are different, such as players being forbidden to call timeouts) has given Van Gundy a new outlook on the basketball world and the geographical world.
In Cuba, he spoke with the Cuban coach through a translator about basketball matters — specifically how Cuba could capitalize on the talents of its huge front line to help make up for inferior guard play.
In Mexico City, he got to coach a game in an arena that was used during the 1968 Olympics for volleyball. In Argentina, he got to eat Argentinean beef.
“What everyone says about the steak in Argentina is absolutely, completely true. Whatever it is they are doing to the steak down there, they just need to keep on doing it.”
Van Gundy’s team will play its next game Sept. 14 in Las Vegas against Uruguay, then will be back in Argentina Nov. 29 before traveling to Uruguay for a game Dec. 2.
The final two qualification games are home games (sites TBD) Feb. 22 against Panama and Feb. 25 against Argentina.
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The operating assumption in the world basketball community is that getting into the World Cup will be a piece of cake for the Americans, but the rules paint a different picture.
With qualification now moving into the second round, and with first-round results carrying over, there are eight teams vying for seven spots — and that eight could become nine or 10 if Panama and/or Mexico can string together a few wins.
Using the photo below as your guide, here are the rules: The top three teams in each group go to China, along with the fourth place team with the best record. And eight teams currently sit at 4-2 or better.
That means the fortunes of Gregg Popovich, LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant and (fill in the blank with the superstar of your choice) are hanging on the outcomes of the games that will be coached by Van Gundy as he completes his hemispheric tour between ESPN/ABC telecasts.
A majority of the first-round games were down-to-the-wire nail-biters, and not many people in the United States are paying all that much attention.
The exceptions are the folks at USA Basketball, including lifers Jim Tooley, Sean Ford, Craig Miller along with Colangelo, Popovich and coach emeritus Mike Krzyzewski, who was at camp in Vegas on Thursday but was absent Friday for what his colleagues believed was a recruiting visit.
“So there are like a half-dozen to a dozen people that have this thing figured out — that we could lose. We could actually fail to qualify,” Van Gundy said.
Nothing should be lost in translation there.
And nobody is going to China representing Team USA unless Van Gundy gets them there.
