Jeff van Gundy, who usually finds himself as a color analyst alongside Mike Breen and Mark Jackson, outdid himself with his jokes once.
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Before becoming a commentator for ABC/ESPN, Jeff van Gundy was an NBA head coach. This man had the respect of several Hall of Fame talents, including the likes of Patrick Ewing and Mark Jackson.
After a spell with the New York Knicks during the late-90s, van Gundy became the head coach of the Houston Rockets. Here he had the opportunity to coach Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming.
He finally gave up his NBA head coaching role for good and settled for a berth as an announcer. And over the years, the younger van Gundy has given us several gems. However, nothing can quite beat his rambling about second cousins with a serious sequence going on.
Jeff van Gundy rambled on about second cousins during a non-blowout NBA game
The Houston Rockets were the class of the NBA during the 2017-18 NBA season. They won 65 games and sealed the no. 1 seed in the Conference with 2 weeks to spare.
Given this background, it was understood that they’d take a few games at the end of the season lightly. Consequentially, they lost a late-March game against the eventual 7th-seeded San Antonio Spurs 100-83.
This game would likely be consigned to the relics of NBA stat books but for van Gundy’s intervention. Even with the 2 teams only 8 points apart on the scoreboard, van Gundy began talking about second cousins out of nowhere:
“What does ‘second cousins’ mean? People say that, but I never know what they mean. What you’re allowed to do if you’re a second cousin. I don’t know what a second cousin means!”
A flustered Mike Breen tried to steer the conversation pointedly away from what Jeff van Gundy was getting at. However, JvG unabashedly went on with his wonderment, eventually causing both Mark Jackson and Mike Breen to laugh sheepishly.
Jeff van Gundy once grabbed Alonzo Mourning’s leg during a Heat-Knicks scuffle
Late in game 4 of Heat vs Knicks 1998, with just over nine minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, a fight broke out between several players on both teams, including Knicks players Larry Johnson and Chris Childs and Heat player P.J. Brown.
As the fight escalated and players began to push and shove each other, Alonzo Mourning rushed in and grabbed Knicks player Charlie Ward, who was trying to break up the fight.
Jeff Van Gundy, seeing Mourning’s aggressive move, rushed over and grabbed onto Mourning’s leg, trying to prevent him from getting involved in the fight any further. It’s made for an all-time NBA meme moment ever since that day.
