Report: Mike D’Antoni joins 76ers as associate head coach
Less than a week after Yahoo Sports NBA columnist Adrian Wojnarowski reported talks had begun, Mike D’Antoni has agreed to become the associate head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, according to Keith Pompey of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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D’Antoni’s addition to Brett Brown’s coaching staff comes on the heels of 76ers co-managing owner Josh Harris, reportedly with at least a little nudging from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, hiring Jerry Colangelo — for the last decade the head of USA Basketball, but before that, the longtime general manager of the Phoenix Suns — as the Sixers’ new special adviser to the managing general partner and chairman of basketball operations.
Colangelo and D’Antoni have a longstanding relationship dating back to their time with the Suns, whom D’Antoni coached to a 253-136 record over five seasons with four playoff appearances, including consecutive Western Conference finals berths in 2004-05 and 2005-06. The Sixers claimed last week, however, that discussions about bringing in the 64-year-old D’Antoni — who’s got 14 years of NBA coaching experience, with 12 coming as a head coach, plus many more years’ worth of experience as a head coach in Italy — predated Colangelo’s addition, as Brown told Pompey:
“For a while now we’ve been trying to figure out where we are as a staff. We have the youngest team in the history of the game and the staff was designed to cater to that, tilted extremely on development and energy. Having a graybeard, true-veteran type NBA coach has been discussed for a while as it relates to growing my staff. Vance Walberg and Chad Iske left last year and we opted to take our existing staff, which I think is fantastic and I love and has been great to me, and grow them. It’s just something that has been kind of ever-present for a while. The timing is disturbing of a leak. We have been talking about it for a while.”
Brown said last week’s hiring of Colangelo, who is based in Phoenix, as a special adviser and the discussions with D’Antoni, who had a ton of success there as a head coach, are not related.
“No, there’s nothing that’s been agreed upon,” said Brown of the talks with D’Antoni. “We’ve discussed people that fit that kind of genre.” […]
“This is a good thing. That name is a good thing,” said Brown. “How can that not be a good thing? I want to make sure that it’s delivered with that spirit. I will be transparent as this plays out. I think what’s most fair to say is Mike D’Antoni is of special interest to me.”
You can certainly understand why. While neither of his last two NBA coaching gigs — with the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers — ended particularly well, D’Antoni is widely regarded as one of the most influential and successful offensive coaches of the era, one of the principal architects of the uptempo, spread pick-and-roll, small-ball-oriented, 3-point-shooting-heavy offensive schemes that have come to dominate the league in this pace-and-space era.
It’d be uncharitable to some of the great coaches of yesteryear — Don Nelson, Doug Moe and Paul Westhead, among others — to suggest that D’Antoni invented a new means of attack from whole cloth with his fabled “Seven Seconds or Less” approach. But his stylistic innovations helped produce some of the most potent offenses in NBA history, unleashed the playmaking and shooting gifts of Steve Nash to help him develop into a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player and surefire Hall of Famer, and planted seeds that would bear fruit for the last four NBA champions, as ESPN.com’s J.A. Adande wrote during the 2015 NBA Finals:
“What happened is you see teams playing a stretch-4, adapting to the rules, coaches have changed their thinking so you’re getting more and more pace and open court,” [Warriors head coach Steve] Kerr said. “And the guys after Mike, [Gregg Popovich] and Erik Spoelstra, have taken a lot of those elements and applied them to their own personnel. I think the game has evolved. I think Mike deserves a ton of credit for the watchability of the NBA. I think it’s way more fun to watch than it was 15 years ago. And Mike … he’s the guy who triggered the changes.”
The Sixers will hope that D’Antoni can trigger some changes in their offense, which has aimed to play a fast-paced, ball- and player-movement heavy, hunt-layups-and-3-pointers style in the three seasons since analytically-inclined general manager Sam Hinkie came to town from the Houston Rockets, but has failed spectacularly in that attempt. A Philadelphia roster that’s been perilously thin on passing and shooting talent ranked dead last in the NBA in points scored per possession in each of the last two seasons, and is right back in the basement again this year, averaging a dismal 91.8 points-per-100 — a full 5.6-per-100 worse than the 29th-ranked Brooklyn Nets, according to NBA.com’s stat tool. In other words, the distance between Philly and the league’s second-worst offense is the same as the one between the No. 3 San Antonio Spurs (106.1-per-100) and the No. 20 Orlando Magic (100.5-per-100).
Nobody’s expecting the 76ers to become a point-producing powerhouse overnight now that D’Antoni’s in the fold, but Philly’s roster does have some raw young talent that D’Antoni could help mold into more effective NBA players.
Point guard Kendall Marshall, who recently returned from a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, played the most productive ball of his NBA career under D’Antoni with the Lakers during the 2013-14 season, averaging eight points, 8.8 assists and 2.9 rebounds in 29 minutes per game in 54 appearances, shooting 40 percent from 3-point range and ranking second in the NBA in assist percentage by dropping dimes on 44.3 percent of his teammates’ baskets. Forward Robert Covington’s struggled a bit with his shot this season, making just under one-third of his long-range tries, but his ability to knock down shots from beyond the arc, knack for creating turnovers on the defensive end (he’s snagging steals on a higher percent of opponents’ possessions than any other NBA player this season) and 6-foot-9 frame make him an intriguing stretch-four.
An offensive reorganization in a D’Antoni system could also pay dividends for Nerlens Noel, who looked like a rising star as the 76ers’ man in the middle last season, but has seemed miscast as a power forward alongside 2015 first-round pick Jahlil Okafor this season. From ESPN Insider and former Suns basketball operations executive Amin Elhassan:
Nerlens Noel in particular would, on paper, be the player who should benefit the most. According to Synergy Sports research, Noel is currently posting up on 19 percent of his offensive possessions, versus 15.5 percent of his offense coming out of the pick-and-roll. For a player with as limited an offensive skillset as Noel’s, the idea of giving him the ball on the block and letting him go to work seems foolish at best and detrimental to his long-term development at worst (post-ups, in general, are an inefficient play type, save for those gifted at it or specific mismatch situations). Presumably, D’Antoni’s influence would bring a boost of pick-and-roll opportunities for Noel, and playing alongside a competent pick-and-roll partner in Marshall will greatly improve the quality of those opportunities.
What this means for Okafor, whose 17.8 points-per-game average leads all rookies but whose back-to-the-basket-focused game and plodding maneuvering seems an awkward fit for a D’Antoni-style system, remains to be seen. In an interview with Sports Illustrated’s Jake Fischer this summer, the coach didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea of building an offense around a post-up pivot:
SI.com: I read about the presentation you gave during the Las Vegas Summer League and, essentially, you said to build a team’s offensive attack around a post player playing with his back to the basket is wasting an opportunity offensively. Why do you think that?
D’Antoni: If you look at the stats around the league, a post-up is not a very good shot. [Laughs] It just isn’t. Now again, in our business and leagues, a lot of times you say something and people take that as 100%: You’re always going to have post-ups and you’re always going to have 15-foot shots. They have not become the best shots. The best shots are layups and foul shots and three-point shots. So you try to gear your offense to where you can exploit those three things. And then, other teams are smart: They run you off the three so you have to shoot a 15-footer, or you can get a mismatch inside where you can post-up, and when you get a mismatch, you have to exploit that. But to go down and put your best offensive player on the block against their best defensive player, it’s just not a great option anymore. It just isn’t.
And yet, it would be a mistake to assume that the version of Okafor we’ve seen through 24 regular-season games — many of which have come, thanks in part to injury and in part to “The Process,” without guards who could capably throw a post-entry pass, as Hinkie recently lamented to ESPN.com’s Zach Lowe — is the only version we could see, especially considering how a D’Antoni system could utilize some of his other skills, and how it might search for opportunities to split Noel and Okafor to provide both greater space to shine. More from Elhassan:
Contrary to popular belief, there is room for post-ups within the D’Antoni playbook. They’re usually there to create a reaction from the defense, thus manufacturing a shot attempt elsewhere. More likely, Okafor’s skill as a passer will be more heavily utilized, something that has been neglected thus far (by way of comparison, Noel is averaging 18 more passes per game than Okafor is!). A lot of D’Antoni’s Elbow series features the big as a playmaker from the high post, and there’s an opportunity for Okafor to exploit that feature of his game more frequently and effectively.
If D’Antoni’s arrival heralds a shuffling-up that puts both Noel and Okafor in more advantageous positions to succeed, frees up Marshall to set the table in a way no other Philly ball-handler can, and helps further the offensive development of the rest of Philadelphia’s litany of young players — point guards Isaiah Canaan and Tony Wroten, shooting guard Nik Stauskas, and wings Jerami Grant, Hollis Thompson and JaKarr Sampson — then the Sixers just might start resembling a functional NBA offense at some point. After two dismal seasons and a 1-26 start to this season, that, at least, represents something to look forward to … and, unlike the promise of Joel Embiid or the theoretical arrival of Dario Saric, this guy’s actually going to be here.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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