SPRINGFIELD, Mass. \u2014 The day before Mike D\u2019Antoni was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Bright Side sat down with the former Phoenix Suns head coach about his time with the Suns, building the iconic Seven Seconds or Less offense, and what he\u2019s feeling before his big day.<\/p>\n
(The following answers have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)<\/p>\n
Now that it\u2019s Hall of Fame Weekend, what are you feeling?<\/p>\n
Mike D\u2019Antoni: It\u2019s a great honor. I mean, I\u2019m sure if you asked all people getting into the Hall of Fame, they would say: \u201cOh my gosh, this is the best.\u201d It kind of validates all the stuff that went on all the years, and it\u2019s a great cap off to a good career. I\u2019m happy with the way it went. I got to be doing something I love for a long time, and it\u2019s the best.<\/p>\n
Who were some of the influential factors in your life to tell you to be yourself? You were an untraditional coach.<\/p>\n
MD: Well, you know, besides being from a family that does that, and my brother who was coaching with me that had a similar philosophy, the main two guys were Jerry Colangelo and Brian Colangelo.<\/p>\n
They put the team together, and then we\u2019re talking about how to play and whatever, and I\u2019m saying, you know, my gut says we should do this, but the traditional way is that. And they say, \u201cgo with your gut, do what you think\u2019s best\u201d. And so that\u2019s when I decided to move Amar\u2019e Stoudemire to the five and Shawn Marion to the four. It comes from years and years of playing, years and years of coaching, and past experiences from when I was a player, and what would feel good, and then as a coach and how it went with my team at Olympia Milano when I really started that.<\/p>\n
How did you find people to buy into your unconventional coaching strategies?<\/p>\n
MD: The players adapt easily because most of the time when you spread the floor, and you run and you give them confidence, then their talents come out. I always try to coach where I didn\u2019t put a ceiling on the players. I trusted them; they knew I trusted them. I didn\u2019t second-guess them. At my level, at the NBA level, you can do that because you have great players that, if they\u2019re not selfish, then they will do what\u2019s right for the team. And I was just blessed with having so many players that put the team first. And it\u2019s easy also to put the team first when your stats are strong because everybody wants to earn money, and you got to earn money by having stats in a career year.<\/p>\n
MD: Yeah, we went where everybody can eat. Instead of that guy posting up this guy all the time, or going to a specific spot with the ball every time, we let everybody feed, and boy, they just bought in and went with it.<\/p>\n
How did Amar\u2019e Stoudemire adapt to your offense, and how did your relationship early in his career help when Steve Nash came back and the Seven Seconds or Less offense began?<\/p>\n
MD: I think it helped. It didn\u2019t hurt. Amar\u2019e was just a raw talent. I could convince the players when I talked to them, and that\u2019s like two hours a day, and we\u2019re going to play a certain way.<\/p>\n
But then they go home and they got to listen to their family members, their uncle who knows better than anybody, and the barber who tells them you can\u2019t play that way that it\u2019s going to kill you, or you listen to talk radio or old talking heads, the old players that play a certain way, and so I knew that doubt would creep in, and we just got really lucky that we went 31-4 right off the bat in the 2004-2005 season. Then the players were buying more in, and we\u2019re up 20 at every time at halftime. So they\u2019re buying in, and then it was easy.<\/p>\n
When people say that the Seven Seconds or Less offense changed the NBA, what does that mean to Mike D\u2019Antoni, the person?<\/p>\n
MD: It\u2019s obviously a little exaggerated. I think we influenced it. Basketball is always evolving, so it was going to happen. Then Steve Kerr and Steph Curry and those guys took it and validated what we tried to do in Phoenix. They\u2019re playing the way that we played because we did it kind of without analytics, and we didn\u2019t have that knowledge yet, and so now they do it with analytics telling them that\u2019s the way to go, and so it\u2019s obviously satisfying.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m more of a fan now and guess what? It\u2019s fun to watch, it\u2019s fun to see people\u2019s talents, and so it is very satisfying. I\u2019m very proud of the fact, and happy to have players and management that bought in, and we went with it.<\/p>\n
Do you see any budding Mike D\u2019Antoni-style coaches in the NBA?<\/p>\n
They\u2019ll do it better. Coaches keep getting better, and I don\u2019t follow that close. I obviously follow guys like Kenny Atkinson, who was with me in New York. But everybody has their style and their demeanor, and it works all kinds of different ways. There\u2019s not one way to play, and you got to do what\u2019s best for your personnel, and that could be all kinds of different venues. And when that happens, you\u2019re a good coach. Whether it\u2019s my style or somebody else\u2019s style, it doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n
You can watch the full interview here:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPRINGFIELD, Mass. \u2014 The day before Mike D\u2019Antoni was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Bright…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3791],"tags":[7,6,2065,472,4045,604,40517],"class_list":["post-814010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-phoenix-suns","tag-basketball","tag-nba","tag-phoenix","tag-phoenix-suns","tag-phoenixsuns","tag-suns","tag-suns-features"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117110628966825732","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}