Profiles in Coaching: Defensive with Mike D’Antoni
The fates of NBA head coaches are hopelessly intertwined with the abilities and personalities of their players. For that reason they usually only get attention for performance on the extreme ends of the spectrum – utter disaster and chest-beating success. But that perspective ignores a creatively rich middle class of coaches grinding away in relative anonymity. Here at Hickory-High we fancy ourselves as the bane of relative anonymity and so for the next few days we’ll be looking at these leaders, both lauded and ignored, for our Profiles in Coaching series.
Mike D’Antoni is the worst coach in the league, right?
I mean, he has to be, considering he’s never coached a good defensive team, and it was totally his fault that (a) his high-priced center wasn’t healthy, (b) his 32-year old power forward is in decline, (c) his 38-year old point guard got injured, and thus (d) he was forced to play his 34-year old an ungodly amount of minutes which may or may not have contributed to him rupturing his Achilles tendon.
There’s just no argument to be made other than Mike D’Antoni is a farce of a head coach who has no idea how to lead a basketball team in any remotely positive direction.
Right?
But what if I told you that D’Antoni’s teams in Phoenix from 2005-2008 ranked 17th, 16th, 13th, and 16th in defensive efficiency, with some combination of Amar’e Stoudemire, Boris Diaw, Steve Nash, and Leandro Barbosa defending at the point of attack?
(*Silence*)
What if I told you that the year after winning 70.7% of his games in Phoenix, the team hired Terry Porter, who went 28-23 (54.9%) before getting fired. A year later, the Suns made it back to the Conference Finals running the same exact offensive system D’Antoni had installed years prior?
(*Silence*)
What if I told you that the 2012 Knicks were the No. 5-ranked defensive team in the league under D’Antoni, and that the team’s turnaround (following an 8-15 start) really happened once Jeremy Lin was inserted into the lineup (a move D’Antoni made), not when D’Antoni resigned in March (when the team was 18-24)?
(*Silence*)
What if I told you that the 2013 Knicks won 54 games running the same exact offense D’Antoni installed when he was the head coach, and that they’re 7-17 this season after Mike Woodson made the decision to move away from a spread pick-and-roll offense and back to the isolation-heavy offense he ran in Atlanta.
(*Silence*)
And what if I told you every top offensive team in the league save for Oklahoma City is running a semi-bastardized version of the D’Antoni offense (or, at the very least, heavily borrowing from its philosophies), most notably San Antonio (Poppovich effectively stole the system from Gentry, a D’Antoni disciple, after the Suns swept the Spurs out of the playoffs in 2010), Miami, Houston, the Clippers, New Orleans, and Golden State, and that, for better or worse (mostly better), D’Antoni permanently changed the way coaches think about how to construct an efficient offense?
(*Crickets*)
This year is no exception.
After losing Monday night, the Lakers are 11-13 despite receiving just 135 ineffectual minutes from Steve Nash and career-worst production from Pau Gasol. Outside of Gasol (who hasn’t been good), the Lakers BEST players have been Jordan Hill (dumped by two teams in the last three years), Jordan Farmar (played in Europe last year after being waived by Atlanta), Nick Young (signed a minimum contract because nobody wanted him), Xavier Henry and Wesley Johnson (former lottery picks who were dumped by their original teams within a year and then were declined team options – the ultimate admission of defeat – by their new teams; both are on minimum, non- or partially-guaranteed contracts), and Steve Blake (a journeyman guard playing for his sixth team, has never even been paid league-average salary).
These are their BEST players.
And the team is 11-13, with wins over the Clippers, Rockets, and Warriors.
I’m sorry, but that’s a [expletive deleted] miracle.
This is the ultimate example of outcast riff-raff. From top-to-bottom, outside of the injured Kobe and Nash, the roster is not that different from Philadelphia’s, a team that could be described as “aggressively tanking.” It’s just littered with fringe players that literally no other team wanted. This is by design, the organization didn’t want to take on any money for next year, and they knew with Kobe’s injury contending for a title wasn’t likely. So they hit the re-set button, stocked up on re-tread failed lottery picks, and made sure they didn’t clutter their cap sheet for next season. There was absolutely no illusion about the goals of the team – they had none.
And yet somehow, the team is barely under .500 in one of the most competitive conferences in the history of the league. They’re currently 12th on the conference table (roughly where they were projected), but they’re just a game and a half behind the 9th-place Warriors, just three games behind Dallas for a playoff spot. There’s no rational reason that the team should be this good.
But they are.
They are because D’Antoni’s system is able to maximize the skills of fringe players. The Lakers were largely a disappointment last season (of course, this was D’Antoni’s fault, not because the team was old and suffered a comical plethora of injuries and they had no training camp for D’Antoni to effectively install his system), but somehow Earl Clark played well enough to get a two-year, $8.5 million contract from Cleveland after being dumped as roster fodder into two mega-trades in two years. Steve Novak had the only two relevant seasons of his life playing in Mike D’Antoni’s offense. Mike D’Antoni’s offense made Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields into multi-millionaires. Wilson Chandler, a late first-round pick, blossomed enough under D’Antoni that he was seen as a valuable trade chip in the negotiations that brought Carmelo Anthony to New York. Chris Duhon dished out 22 assists – in regulation – with D’Antoni on the sidelines pulling the strings.
This year, Xavier Henry, Wesley Johnson, Jordan Hill, and Shawne Williams (given up on by a combined 11 teams over the last five seasons) have played meaningful minutes for a team that’s legitimately competitive, not just in a cute “Oh, look, they’re trying to win” kind of way.
Yes, D’Antoni has flaws. A large part of coaching is communicating and managing personalities, something he has had problems with in his three stops (I feel okay ignoring his stint in Denver during the 1999 lockout-shortened season for a variety of reasons). And yes, he’s very inflexible with his system.
But, on some level, he’s justified in his inflexibility. His results speak for themselves. In 2005 and 2007, his Phoenix teams were first in the league in offensive efficiency (and it wasn’t particularly close, either – they were a full two points better in each season than the next-best team). In 2006 and 2008, they were second. In 2009 and 2010 in New York, he manufactured league-average offenses (17th both years) with minimum offensive talent as the front office tore down the team in an effort to clear 2010 cap space. In 2011 with a revolving door roster, the Knicks had the No. 7 offense. In 2013’s “train wreck” of a Lakers’ season, L.A. had the 9th-ranked offense on a per-possession basis.
His style and high-profile employment has made him a lightning rod for criticism, but most of the criticisms lack context. He’s a poor defensive coach, ignoring that the one year he had a roster capable of playing NBA-caliber defense, they were a top-five defensive team. He’s inflexible with his system, ignoring that he has good reason to be. He plays his stars too many minutes, ignoring that his rosters don’t allow him the luxury of resting them. He’s never won a title, ignoring that Joe Johnson’s injury in 2005 and the Stoudemire/Diaw suspensions in 2007 have a lot more to do with that than he does.
This season isn’t going to assuage any of those criticisms, simply because high-profile coaches overachieving with an overmatched roster usually isn’t a big talking point. The narrative usually becomes that Players X and Y was underrated to begin with and the coach just lucked into the unexpected success.
But make no mistake – Mike D’Antoni has been as impressive as any coach in the league this season.
