Mike D’Antoni, Houston Rockets, (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)
This Houston Rockets‘ season was more of the same from Mike D’Antoni, always surrounded by dazzling superstars and never quite hitting the peak.
All the way back in February, the Rockets seemingly were souring on Mike D’Antoni. Before landing Robert Covington for a full-time small ball experiment, or even the specter of the coronavirus, Houston was in a rut and looked due for yet another middling seed in the playoffs. Despite so much uncertainty regarding the resumption of the season, the D’Antoni noise hasn’t died down. Should the NBA find its way back to the court this year, it looks like it will be title or bust for D’Antoni.
It’s not hard to see why. Though revolutionary and likable, D’Antoni has always coached with competing motivations. As a tactician, D’Antoni changed the game. As the leader of his players, D’Antoni is most content to let the strongest personalities dictate the character of his team. Steve Nash was a beloved teammate and a learned veteran by the time he took control of the Suns in the mid-2000s. There wasn’t much D’Antoni needed to do.
In “:07 Seconds or Less” by Jack McCallum, D’Antoni most often is seen polling his assistants and weighing the value of challenging a player or upping the ante on his team. While he was always pushing the boundaries of small lineups and 3-point shooting, D’Antoni mostly let his players manage themselves. D’Antoni’s relationship frayed with Shawn Marion by 2008 to such a degree that Marion, the Suns’ second-best player for nearly a decade, asked for a trade. Soon after, D’Antoni followed him out the door.
The story in New York and Los Angeles wasn’t much different. D’Antoni recruited Amar’e Stoudemire to New York but couldn’t make it work with Carmelo Anthony and Jeremy Lin before being fired midway through the 2010-11 season.
He followed that up with a stint with the Lakers that failed to live up to even greater hype. D’Antoni couldn’t get through to or properly use Pau Gasol or overcome an injury to Steve Nash. As always, there are excuses for why and how it didn’t work, but D’Antoni’s coaching was never able to overcome bumps in the road. The whole situation did, however, lead to the best encapsulation of D’Antoni’s coaching style in what soon became an iconic NBA artifact, straight from the Lakers’ training table.
Though D’Antoni was never afraid to take on the challenge of managing personalities — certainly he’s coached some of the biggest stars in the history of the NBA — this memeable photo shows exactly the problem with his coaching style. Two superstars standing over D’Antoni, duking it out, the coach merely trying to get out of the way. Silly or not, it honestly doesn’t seem like much of a joke at all.
After a 27-55 season with the Lakers in 2013-14, D’Antoni got fired again and left the NBA for a couple of years before rehabilitating his image as Jerry Colangelo’s plant on the 76ers’ staff in 2015. That ultimately led him to Houston, where the same stylistic breakthroughs and quick improvement were followed by infighting and playoff letdowns.
Two things can be true: D’Antoni is a smart basketball coach and an ineffective manager. James Harden became one of the most menacing, efficient scorers in the league when D’Antoni took over, and Chris Paul became a perfect running mate. Yet just as quickly as it came together, it fell apart. By the summer of 2019, Rockets PR was working overtime to cover up the perception that Harden and Paul didn’t like each other, and by the end of that offseason, general manager Daryl Morey had replaced Paul with Russell Westbrook, who is near the bottom of the list of players who fit the scheme Morey, Harden and D’Antoni built in Houston. Through two-thirds of the 2019-20 season, Harden and Westbrook appeared to make it work, but only because D’Antoni and Harden were willing to cede full control of the offense to the team’s new star. Whether that was a mistake or a breakthrough is yet to be determined.
And D’Antoni may not be the person to see it through. Sam Amick of The Athletic recently reported that unless Houston wins the 2020 championship, the Rockets will let D’Antoni’s contract expire. The two sides couldn’t agree on a long-term extension last summer either and instead decided to ride out the final year of D’Antoni’s contract. Though Houston played better in February in March, two straight knockouts in the Western Conference Finals and a poor start to 2019-20 makes it hard for Morey and owner Tilman Fertitta to justify keeping the same group in place much longer.
Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau are the two names that have come up thus far in reports about a possible replacement for D’Antoni, so it’s clear the Rockets still want a veteran coach. Quibble with those options all you want, but it’s hard to argue D’Antoni deserves much more time on the job. At age 69, D’Antoni is also one of the oldest coaches in the NBA. Galvanizing a locker room of millionaires probably isn’t getting any easier, and after coaching five of the league’s most prolific franchises, where else is there for D’Antoni to go?
The final pages of the book on D’Antoni aren’t yet written, but each chapter has been vaguely the same. No one can understate the impact D’Antoni had on how NBA basketball is played, but there’s no way to look past his repeated failures without seeing the trend line. If this is truly it, our final memory will not be so different from the impression D’Antoni left us with all along: It could have been so much better.