Veteran coach Jeff Van Gundy joined LA as an assistant this season.
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The LA Clippers have been a winning program every regular season since the 2011 lockout ended. What they haven’t always been is a top defense.
The highest ranked defense of Vinny Del Negro’s tenure was being No. 8 in 2012-13, which was his final season. In Doc Rivers’ seven seasons as head coach, the Clippers only had three top-10 defenses, peaking at fifth in 2015-16 and Rivers’ final season in 2019-20. Tyronn Lue’s defense ranked eighth in 2021 and ’22 but slipped to 17th in 2023 and 16th in ’24.
The solution for Lue’s 2024-25 Clippers? Jeff Van Gundy.
He was hired as lead assistant coach and Lue’s defensive coordinator after spending the 2023-24 season as a senior consultant with the NBA champion Boston Celtics. Before last season, Van Gundy was on ESPN’s top broadcast team for 16 seasons after ending four years as head coach of the Houston Rockets in 2007. The last time Van Gundy was an assistant coach was in the 1995-96 season; he replaced Don Nelson as head coach of the New York Knicks in March of that season.
Based on his history, it was clear where Van Gundy was likely to focus on improving the Clippers’ defense. Van Gundy was an assistant before, during and after Pat Riley’s time as head coach of the Knicks, the same Riley who once quipped, “No rebounds, no rings.” Van Gundy, who won nearly 60 percent of his games in Houston and New York, always had a top-10 defense as a head coach, and all but one of his teams had a top-10 ranking in defensive rebound percentage while taking away the paint and fast-break points.
This season, only the Oklahoma City Thunder and Orlando Magic were better defensively than the Clippers, and no team was better on the defensive glass despite the Clippers finishing 24th in that category a year ago.
Van Gundy was the catalyst for that.
LA Clippers defense, last two seasons
| Season | Team | Efficiency | TO% | 3PG | FTAr | dREB% | FG% | Fastbreak | Paint |
| 2023-24 | Clippers | 16 | 20 | 14 | 10 | 24 | 12 | 21 | 14 |
| 2024-25 | Clippers | 3 | 8 | 9 | 17 | 1 | 8 | 12 | 6 |
“Every year, we kind of mentioned that we’re a bad defensive transition team, a bad defensive rebounding team,” said center Ivica Zubac, who was the only player in the NBA this season to grab at least 1,000 rebounds and finished seventh in defensive rebounds per game (8.9). “That was something I wanted to get better at, something I can directly control. And JVG, beginning of the season, pushed me a lot, pushed the whole team a lot. Gotta be better in those two areas.”
Zubac said that Van Gundy was “treating every game like it’s playoffs.” And this season, the Clippers weren’t just good overall defensively; they were consistent.
In the first quarter of the season, the Clippers had the fifth-best defense in the league. From Dec. 6 to Jan. 24, the Clippers had the second-best defense. The Clippers slipped from Jan. 25 to March 9, ranking 16th. But from March 10 through the end of the regular season, the Clippers had the NBA’s third-best defense.
Now that it’s the playoffs, Zubac said that Van Gundy “went to the next level of locked in.” Perhaps that was on display when Van Gundy and longtime Clippers trainer Jasen Powell were wrestling for the ball with Denver center Nikola Jokić late in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Clippers-Nuggets first-round series.
“I saw some memes out there with JVG,” said Lue, who claims not to be active on social media. “But I mean, the ball came to him. He didn’t take it from Joker. The ball came to him, he was going to give it to the referee. When you’re competitive and somebody tries to snatch the ball from you, you’ve got to hold on to it, so I guess that’s what JVG did.”
As locked in as Van Gundy has been on the bench, that’s how locked in Clippers defenders have been when they have played their best in April.
During the regular season, two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year Kawhi Leonard remarked in his first game back that Van Gundy told players, “Nobody watches this s— more than me.”
In the playoffs, Leonard has been motivated by his team’s renewed defensive spirit.
“I have to give credit to my coaching staff, starting with JVG, just being focused on that end,” Leonard said last week. “Coming in with a passionate, aggressive mindset for us all. And it kind of (trickles) down to us. And then from there, there’s guys on the floor that want to guard. They’re not just pointing at me and telling me to take them.
“These guys are looking an opponent in the eyes and saying, ‘I want him.’ They motivate me defensively, especially Kris Dunn, just seeing how he plays every game. With Derrick Jones Jr. coming in and Zu being that back line, and how they just want to play. They motivate me to play, you know what I mean?”
It’s not just the stars whom Van Gundy is tasked with putting in position to help the Clippers defensively. Before the start of the playoffs, Lue said that backup center Ben Simmons and two-way contract power forward Patrick Baldwin Jr. were serving as the scout team’s Jokić in preparation for the three-time MVP. Simmons later said that wasn’t the case, but in speaking to The Athletic after Game 4, Baldwin described his role while getting coached by Van Gundy.
“These past two weeks, you kind of put on your acting cap and study his mannerisms and how he carries himself,” said Baldwin, a 6-foot-9, 2022 first-round pick who was tasked with being the scout team’s Keegan Murray during the Golden State Warriors’ 2023 series against the Sacramento Kings. “Just try to envision yourself as that player, just to give these guys the best look possible. Because obviously, I’m not on the playoff roster.
“But this is, even for a playoff run like this, guys that aren’t playing have roles. You gotta be there for support. When Van Gundy says, ‘Hey, you’re Jokić,’ that’s my role. In practice and scouting sessions.”
Lue has always leaned on his coaches for more than just strategic support; they are his support system. When Van Gundy was head coach of the Rockets, Lue played 21 games to begin the 2004-2005 season in Houston. The two grew closer when they were on the staff of the U.S. men’s basketball national team.
“Just getting him to laugh, you know, just getting him to enjoy the game, enjoy life,” Lue said of his growing relationship with Van Gundy this season. “When I played for him in 2004, he was just straight ahead. He would get on the elevator, he might not speak. …
“People that don’t know him, when you see him from the outside looking in, you don’t know he has a great personality, and he’s funny as hell. … The relationship we had when I was a player to now is … different.”
That connection has made an impression on players as well. This is the first top-five defense that James Harden, a 16-year veteran and future Hall-of-Famer who has been to the postseason every season of his career, has been a part of. After Game 3 at Intuit Dome, which featured multiple performances by the Ying Yang Twins, Harden was asked about what makes Lue and Van Gundy so effective as a pairing.
“It’s like the perfect relationship,” Harden said. “They just know what the hell they’re doing, you know what I mean? Seriously, like, they’re always on the same page. They don’t overstep each other’s toes. They tell us what we need to do on both ends of the ball, and we go out there and do it. But it’s just like, they’re yin and yang. Literally, the Ying Yang Twins.”
Law Murray is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the LA Clippers. Prior to joining The Athletic, he was an NBA editor at ESPN, a researcher at NFL Media and a contributor to DrewLeague.com and ClipperBlog. Law is from Philadelphia, Pa., and is a graduate of California University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. Follow Law on X @LawMurrayTheNU
With the success that Van Gundy has had, the question now is, could he be a head coach again for the first time since 2007?
There are only four head coaching spots either vacant or occupied on an interim basis right now, all in the Western Conference: Denver, Memphis, Sacramento and Phoenix. When Van Gundy was hired, Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank said that Van Gundy “is such a coaching and basketball purist that he’d only want to go somewhere where the head coach has unbelievable security and faith.”
It remains to be seen if those openings or any others pique Van Gundy’s interest, but Lue knows his assistant is “definitely a head coach.”
“We’ve seen his work before, in New York, in Houston,” Lue said. “It all depends on if he wants to do it or not. I would hate to lose him, but he’s the most qualified. Like I said, it’s all up to JVG if he wants to coach and be a head coach again. … (He) changed our defense and our program defensively and brought us some things that we haven’t been accustomed to that’s worked. … He’s great for us. He’d be a great head coach again as well.”
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Law Murray is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the LA Clippers. Prior to joining The Athletic, he was an NBA editor at ESPN, a researcher at NFL Media and a contributor to DrewLeague.com and ClipperBlog. Law is from Philadelphia, Pa., and is a graduate of California University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. Follow Law on Twitter @LawMurrayTheNU
