Mike D’Antoni knows the perception. He also knows his own track record.
In 10 full seasons as coach with four different NBA franchises, no D’Antoni team has ever ranked higher than 13th in team defense.
“It’s the No. 1 misperception — that I don’t care about defense,” D’Antoni said. “I don’t know of any coach alive that doesn’t want to win and defense is a big part of winning.
“Now I do believe that it’s not everything. You can have a great defense or a great offense and get as much talent as you can find to have one or the other be great. But the idea is you want both of them to complement each other, hopefully.”
That’s the challenge now in Houston, where D’Antoni has been on hand for a little less than a month. He has his broom and dustpan and is starting to sweep up the pieces of a broken season that saw the Rockets follow their promising 2014 run to the 2015 Western Conference finals with a 41-41 bundle of disappointment and dysfunction.
It was a curious hire to many. A team that saw drastic slippage at the defensive end was turning to a coach whose greatest success has been at the other end of the court.
In his four best seasons in Phoenix (2004-08), the Suns won 62, 54, 61 and 55 games, respectively. They twice reached the Western Conference finals behind the singular talents of two-time MVP point guard Steve Nash, the slashing Amar’e Stoudemire and the so-called “seven seconds or less” offense that emphasized constantly attacking.
“The year we won 62 games, we also won 32 road games,” D’Antoni said. “There’s no doubt that we had some very gifted offensive players. But in this league you don’t win 32 games on the road without playing some kind of defense.
“I would say that in all our time as a coaching staff we would scheme and say, ‘How can we get better defensively?’ Because we knew that if we could have gotten into the top 10 defensively, we would have won the championship. Or if San Antonio hadn’t been there, we’d have won. So it wasn’t for lack of trying. We just didn’t quite get over the hump. That’s the misperception.”
So he’s brought in assistant Jeff Bzdelik as his defensive specialist and added Roy Rogers to a coaching staff that will focus on getting the 2016-17 roster reading from the same page of the chemistry textbook.
While there were a few other factors that played a part, it was the deteriorated relationship between James Harden and Dwight Howard that caused much of the camaraderie and selflessness of the 2014 playoff run to fade in 2015-16.
“Not being here, I don’t want to speak out of turn,” D’Antoni said. “Obviously there were some chemistry issues or the pieces just didn’t fit together like they did two years ago. They could be the same people, but different mindsets, different agendas, different whatever. Once it starts to go down the wrong path, this is a very competitive league, and it doesn’t take much to play play bad. It’s all a little bit of a mental game. Last year it just didn’t click for whatever reason. I can’t answer the difference in those last two seasons. I’d just always be careful to make snap judgments from the outside.
“What I do know — and one of the biggest reasons why I wanted this job — is because there are some exciting young guys on this roster and you have arguably one of the top five players in the league.”
Fittingly, perhaps only Harden has had his commitment on the defensive end questioned as much as D’Antoni. They worked together on USA Basketball in 2012 at the London Olympics and in 2014 at the World Cup in Spain.
“So I know his personality. He’s a good guy,” D’Antoni said. “James is at the stage of his career, like it gets to with most guys, where he just wants to win. He’s a great passer. He sees the floor really well. He’s a great finisher. There are so many positives. That’s what attracted me here. We just have to be able to accentuate his positives and work on things that need to be worked on and get the whole team functioning a little better.
“I am aware of the criticisms, but I don’t know if I put that much stock in them because everybody gets that. Perception, as I said and know from first-hand experience, is not always reality. Sometimes people think one thing and they really don’t know. I will be a little slow believing what the perception is. I want to see it. I want to feel it. I want to see how James can get even better and I’ve got no reason to believe that can’t and won’t happen.”
What it’s not all about for D’Antoni is simply trying to beat the clock with a hellbent “seven seconds or less” philosophy that became the the title of a book on his high-powered Phoenix days.
“We’re not trying to beat the clock. What I’ve shown James and the other guys is that our pace at Phoenix, it just seemed extra fast because we were just always going, attacking. It was a normal pace that anybody could run. Nobody’s running flat-out all the time.
“But most of the time offensive is a rhythm and we’ll get into that rhythm, whether it’s seven seconds or 15 seconds or 20 seconds. I don’t care, just as long as it produces a good shot.
“Now having said that, defenses are so good that it is better if you have a higher-paced game. The players dictate if it’s seven or six or 12 seconds.
“Look, the ball is going to be in James’ hands a lot. It’s going to stop there a lot. That’s for a very good reason. But at the same time, you’ve also got to have the other players feeling like they’re a part of something.
“When you can get a group of guys all buying into something, then into everything, that’s when special things can take place. I’m here because I think that can happen with a few changes.”
Starting with perceptions.
