RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesTwo hands. That’s the way you’re taught, from the first time you set foot on the court and your coach has you pair up to start practicing how to pass. Whether you’re bouncing it off the wood or sailing it from your chest, you throw the pass with two hands. That’s how you best ensure the ball will arrive safely; that’s just how it’s done.
“How it’s done,” of course, changes as the passer and recipient grow up, and especially as the passer grows more daring. In a story included in his wonderful 2010 book, "The Art of a Beautiful Game," Chris Ballard noted that part of what made Steve Nash such a brilliant and multifaceted facilitator was his predilection toward eschewing time-honored, bog-standard two-hand feeds in favor of one-handed deliveries from all angles. Those more risqué, insecure transmissions might set most orthodox coaches’ teeth on edge. What Nash’s coach lamented, though, was that we hadn’t broken from orthodoxy sooner.
“Sometimes we’re slow on teaching things,” Mike D’Antoni told Ballard. “Most coaches teach you to put two hands on it, and to be honest with you, we probably need to teach kids to throw with one hand. Sometimes, I think we limit.”
D’Antoni’s coaching career was nothing if not a repudiation of those limits — a decades-long exploration of just how far, and how fast, one could push the line of offensive innovation. The results of that inquest include:
672 regular-season victories as an NBA head coach, placing him 22nd on the all-time coaching wins list ;
10 playoff appearances in 16 seasons, including three trips to the conference finals, leading four separate franchises to the postseason;
Two selections as the NBA’s Coach of the Year — one in 2004-05, when his “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns took the NBA by storm, and in 2016-17, when he led the Rockets to 55 wins and the NBA’s No. 2 offense in his first year on the job — making him one of just 11 coaches in history to earn the honor multiple times ;
Creating an offensive ecosystem in which two different lead guards under his charge, Nash and James Harden, could be named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player (and which could also coax career-best play from the likes of Jeremy Lin, Steve Blake, Kendall Marshall, Raymond Felton, et al.);
Ushering in a pace-and-space uprising in Phoenix that would play a gargantuan role in redefining how offenses would operate in the decades to come;
And, as of this weekend, enshrinement in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
“A coach is only as good as his players are,” D’Antoni told reporters this spring, according to NBA.com’s Jeff Zillgitt . “And I got really lucky.”
D’Antoni wasn’t the first head coach to preach the gospel of stomping the gas pedal to the floorboards, hunting opportunities to score early in the shot clock, playing smaller if it meant getting more skilled players on the floor, bombing 3-pointers or weaponizing the space that shooters can create by attacking the rim. (Shouts out to the late, great Don Nelson , and to “Guru of Go” Paul Westhead .) But the way he coalesced those principles, his dogged commitment to them, and the expression and success they found in the mid-aughts “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns helped fundamentally change offensive basketball .
Steve Nash and Mike D'Antoni made magic in Phoenix. (Photo by John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) John W. McDonough via Getty Images
Which is kind of funny, considering, as D’Antoni once told The Athletic’s David Aldridge . “My whole thing was defense.”
“I was an awful offensive player,” he said. “I knew how to run an offense, and I could pass. But I couldn’t finish. One of the reasons I went to Italy was because I couldn’t shoot the ball.”
This is, perhaps, too unkind a reading. (Read enough about D’Antoni, or listen to him long enough, and you’ll become intimately familiar with his gift for self-deprecation.) After averaging 15.3 points per game on 45.4% shooting as a collegian at Marshall University, D’Antoni became a second-round pick of the then-Kansas City-Omaha Kings back in 1973, spent a season with the Spirits of St. Louis in the ABA, and had a cup of coffee with the San Antonio Spurs — a team that would later become the bane of his existence as the head coach of the Suns — before the unceremonious end of his stateside playing days. But the self-described “feisty little prick” wasn’t done yet.
D’Antoni would go overseas, landing with Italy’s Olimpia Milano, where he’d become a teammate of Joe “Jellybean” Bryant — and a favorite of Bryant’s young son, Kobe, who would later call D’Antoni “one of my first basketball heroes.” (Alas, that early-days hero worship didn’t necessarily help D’Antoni keep everything copacetic during his ill-fated sojourn with the Kobe-Dwight Howard-era Lakers.) Over 13 seasons in Milan, D’Antoni became one of the most decorated players in European hoops history: the club’s all-time leading scorer, and the winner of five Italian League titles, two FIBA European Champions Cups (what we now call the EuroLeague), two Italian Cups, one FIBA Korać Cup and a FBA Intercontinental Cup.
After retiring as a player in 1990, D’Antoni began his life as a coach: first for Olimpia Milano, and then with Benetton Treviso. In Europe, D’Antoni began his experimentation with reorienting the geometry of the floor. Everyone knows big men are supposed to stay planted near the basket. What D’Antoni’s system presupposed was … maybe they aren’t?
“The one thing that I was able to jump on real quick was the big guys,” D’Antoni told reporters this spring, according to Zillgitt . “I thought they were much more skilled. They could shoot the 3, they could run, they could handle the ball. We could do a lot of different things, and I could open up the game a lot more because of their skill. So that was probably the influence that Europe gave me, was that you can play five-out because your center and [power forward] and everybody, you have five skilled players...
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