Stan Van Gundy says Reggie Miller at MSG is 'great theater'
Former NBA player and current analyst Reggie Miller. Credit: Getty Images
Stan Van Gundy had a front-row seat on Wednesday night, and with it a firsthand view of the Reggie Miller Experience at Madison Square Garden.
Naturally, Knicks fans took note of the former Pacer / Garden villain as he and Van Gundy worked as TNT analysts for Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals.
“It’s great theater having Reggie there,” Van Gundy said Thursday during an early morning chat with four reporters at a Midtown Manhattan hotel after the Pacers’ 138-135 victory in overtime.
“Some of the fans were yelling at him and stuff. Most of it good-natured. Some of it not so much, to be quite honest. But Reggie handles it all really well.”
Miller has declined interview requests this week, but he got dragged back into the story in Game 1 when Tyrese Haliburton reprised Miller’s choke gesture from the 1994 playoffs against the Knicks after tying the game at the regulation buzzer.
After the Pacers completed their come-from-behind victory, Haliburton said he and Miller “locked eyes.”
“Really cool that he was in the building,” Haliburton said.
It also was cool for TNT, which has carried NBA games since 1989 but no longer will do so after this series under a new set of NBA television contracts.
“For us, it’s fabulous,” Van Gundy said. “For TV, it's fabulous. If you think about this is going to be the last series we do on TNT, and we get Knicks-Pacers with Reggie doing it, that's storybook stuff.
“Reggie plays it straight as an announcer. He really does. But the history is the history . . . The only thing missing from last night, quite honestly, was Spike.”
Film director Spike Lee, a Knicks fan who inspired Miller’s gesture in 1994, was absent from Game 1, busy at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
For most of the season, the Cavaliers and Celtics appeared destined to meet in the conference finals. Then the Pacers upset the former and the Knicks the latter.
“It’s just a great, great storyline,” Van Gundy said. “As soon as it was obvious those were going to be the two teams, I was texting [colleagues] saying, basically, ‘Can you believe this? This is what we're going to get for the conference finals.’ ”
Van Gundy knows the Garden well, having spent 13 seasons with four teams as an NBA coach, and having watched his brother, Jeff, work as a Knicks assistant and head coach from 1989-2001.
Before the playoffs began, Stan described Knicks fans as “front-running” in the New York Post. He said he did not hear any fallout from that on Wednesday night – presumably because fans were more focused on Miller.
But he did not back down from his remark.
“I still stand by that,” he said. “Knicks fans are great fans, but come on, you [reporters] have been there . . . I've been in all these arenas. If things are going bad in Indiana, the Indiana fans are going to try to rally their team back.
“The Knicks fans are going to boo their team. If that 14-0 [Knicks] run had been the other way early in the fourth quarter and the Knicks went down 16, they're getting booed. They're getting booed. That's just the way it is.
“So that's all I was talking about. Knicks fans are great. They're passionate. They're enjoying this moment, so more power to them. But my ‘front-runner’ comment was just that, that when things are going bad, they're not trying to rally everybody. They're going to pound you.”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
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