D'Antoni's decision to leave is puzzling
by Mark Kriegel
The parent companies change ? Gulf & Western, Paramount, Viacom, Cablevision ? but the guiding principle of business affairs at Madison Square Garden remains the same. For as long as I can remember, the guys who run basketball's supposed Mecca have always outbid the market for the services of the biggest available name.
In this case, it's Donnie Walsh hiring Mike D'Antoni at $24 million for four years.
It used to be that big money went to a big name who'd won championships, coaches like Pat Riley and Larry Brown (the latter being a disaster, of course, though I didn't hear complaints at the time). But Mike D'Antoni's teams ? abundantly talented and much-praised for basketball aesthetics ? never won a conference title, much less a championship.
I won't mind, a couple of years from now, writing how wrong I was. That's how much I think of Walsh. But I don't get this one, not at all.
There are only two reasons for D'Antoni to have done this deal. First, the money. Second, he no longer believes he can win with the Phoenix Suns. And if I'm in Walsh's position, that bothers me.
I don't care if Steve Nash and Shaquille O'Neal are getting old. They're still Steve Nash and Shaquille O'Neal. Same for Grant Hill. There's also Boris Diaw, 26, Leandro Barbosa, 25, and Amare Stoudemire, also 25, who just happens to be the most talented big man in the game. A basketball man has all that, and he leaves to coach the Knicks of Stephon Marbury and Zach Randolph?
D'Antoni's agent has been quoted as saying, "Mike's looking forward to the challenge."
Really, now, what's the truer test of a coach? Making the Knicks appear respectable in a conference where 38 wins gets you a playoff berth, or finally getting the Suns to the Finals? Seems to me he's found a way out of the bigger challenge.
The Knicks won't be any good ? authentically good, I mean ? until they get under the cap and purchase a free agent like LeBron James. That'll take at least three years. In the meantime, you have every right to wonder about D'Antoni's system, dubbed "Seven Seconds or Less" in a fine book by Jack McCallum. With the Suns, D'Antoni wanted a good shot in seven seconds. With the Knicks, seven seconds is the over-under for Eddy Curry making it across half-court.
It has long been fashionable to bemoan the ugly '90s style powerball (ironically, it was the guy with the prettiest-ever game, Michael Jordan, who did more for isolation offense and bruising defenses than even Pat Riley and Chuck Daly). Everybody likes to see teams run and gun. But if such a scheme were really the basis for a championship, the And1 traveling squad would be in the Finals every year. Now as ever ? the Suns had to find this out the hard way ? you don't win on style points (though the Spurs, with Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, never got nearly enough). You win on defense. And the fact of the matter is, Mike D'Antoni's Phoenix team didn't play much.
Take Stoudemire, for instance. You can't tell me he lacks the talent to play defense. He just doesn't bother. Whose fault is that, though? Part of it has to be D'Antoni's.
Defense, most of it, anyway, is about desire and coaching. If you don't have the desire, you need some coaching. A good coach makes you fear the personal consequences of not playing defense. A great coach makes you feel a need to defend; he's able to sell you on the idea that defense is connected to the greater glory. D'Antoni, for all the talent at his disposal, didn't view defense as a priority. That's just a fact.
Mark Jackson would've been a better choice. I would hope his friendship with Jeff Van Gundy (still considered an enemy by Cablevision) had nothing to do the Knicks passing on his services. Donnie Walsh has hired former players lacking in experience as head coaches before, and Jackson seemed ideally suited for this franchise at this time. He may have actually motivated Marbury, if only for a year.
This belated endorsement comes with a declaration of my own prejudices, of course. Jackson is a New Yorker, imbued with that now-ancient sense of basketball as the city's game. But he was also a great playmaker, having run the point for two very good powerball teams, the Knicks and the Pacers. More than that, though, I'd like to think he had acquired a sober sense of the treacherous intramural politics in and around Madison Square Garden.
I fear Mike D'Antoni will come by this knowledge the hard way. There's a reason the Knicks have to outbid everybody. At the Garden, six mill per isn't what it's cracked up to be.
I guess I'm scratching my head on this one -- does Kriegel REALLY not understand why D'Antoni left? D'Antoni MIGHT have been allowed to continue in Phoenix but count me as one who is doubtful. Kerr can't keep D'Antoni around without making it look like he was the one that made the mistake by trading for Shaq. Dolan hired Walsh because he didn't want to have to admit that he made a mistake in Isaiah Thomas so he hired someone who he KNEW would fire him (although I do believe that Walsh is a great GM -- he WILL improve things in NY -- given time to bail out Isaiah's expensive sinking ship). Kerr wasn't going to fire D'Antoni immediately but he certainly was going to put more pressure on him in the upcoming year -- and Kerr is already more involved in the coaching arena than D'Antoni prefers.
I think that D'Antoni is in for a RUDE awakening in New York. I think he designed a system in Phoenix that made him look like a genius but he had the PERFECT point guard for that system in Nash. Make no mistake, Nash AND D'Antoni made each other look better than they are -- Nash was a perfect fit for D'Antoni's system and suddenly Nash looks like a MVP candidate in Phoenix -- he didn't look like that in Dallas and hasn't looked as good with Shaq on the floor. Make no mistake -- NY WILL be a better team -- but they can't help but be a better team than they were with Thomas. However, trying to accomplish the same thing in NY that he did in Phoenix will be tough. The good news for D'Antoni is that I do believe that Walsh doesn't have any huge immediate expectations for the Knicks outside of trying to put a team on the court that will compete. I think that D'Antoni has a better of chance of success in that area than Thomas ever did -- I believe that players will respect D'Antoni -- I doubt if anyone respected Thomas. Thomas is still trying to live on what he did in the NBA 20 years ago -- and amazingly enough, people STILL keep paying him for it even when he has shown what a HORRENDOUS job he has done with everything he manages to put his hands on (CBA, GM, Coaching, on and on and on). I think Walsh will be telling D'Antoni "it's going to take time to turn this around -- just work on competing night in and night out and in 4 or 5 years when we have dumped the bloated salaries (and the bloated players) who are attached to them -- then we will begin to expect you to build a championship team -- and I will give you the players you need to get there.
With all of that said, NY STILL overpaid for D'Antoni but that's probably something Walsh HAD to do to get a decent coach to work with the squad that Thomas put together.
