His teams rarely beat themselves
What does Steve Clifford’s five-year tenure as the Charlotte Hornets’ head coach tell us about what to expect from Clifford’s Orlando Magic teams?
Magic President of Basketball Operations Jeff Weltman gave it a stab on Wednesday.
“The bottom line is when you play a Steve Clifford team,” Weltman said, “you have to beat them. They don’t beat themselves. And over the course of five years, that’s what the real attraction was.”
Stan Van Gundy is one of Clifford’s mentors and best friends, but Van Gundy faced off against Clifford’s Hornets teams each of the last four seasons when Van Gundy coached the Detroit Pistons.
“They were really fundamentally sound,” Van Gundy told the Orlando Sentinel in a phone interview Wednesday.
“They didn’t beat themselves. They were always extremely well-prepared. If you were going to go in and beat them, you had to go in and play well and beat them. They weren’t going to cough it up 21 times and give you 18 fast-break points and 15 second-chance points where you didn’t even have to really play well to beat them.”
Let’s take a look at some of the commonalities of Clifford’s Charlotte teams. five seasons, according to the NBA’s data. That means they almost always did the league’s best job of collecting available potential defensive rebounds.
Clifford’s Charlotte teams didn’t give away the ball often.
They finished with the NBA’s lowest team turnover percentage in each of Clifford’s first four seasons, according to the NBA’s statistical database. What happened in the fifth season? They ranked second.
The Hornets also were disciplined in avoiding fouls.
Charlotte committed the fewest personal fouls in the NBA during the 2013-14 season, the second-fewest the next year, the third-fewest in 2015-16, the fewest in 2016-17 and the secondfewest this past season.