Great article on D'Antoni. Thought it was a really good read, found the part about Kerr/D'Antoni a little disheartening.
Some interesting excerpts:
“People think he just rolls out a ball and tells the guys to shoot it till they’re tired,” says Alvin Gentry, a Suns assistant and a former head coach himself. “The whole idea of spacing, moving the big men out and keeping the middle open for drivers, the drags and drops” — a series of on-the-fly screens meant to create easy shots — “if that’s so simple, how come no one tried it until he came along? Outside of Phil Jackson or Greg Popovich, you show me a coach who’s brighter than Mike, or more brilliant at making teams adjust to him.”
His hardwired offense gets all the play, but the soft-tissue stuff — the way he deals with psyches — is every bit the anomaly these days. “Mike is the best I’ve seen at handling players,” says Gentry, who stayed with Phoenix for family reasons after D’Antoni took the job in New York. “It’s no big secret we had guys who needed stroking, and the way he pumped up Shawn [Marion] and Leandro [Barbosa] with confidence — hell, this group went to war for him every night.” In a profession of screamers and cross-armed strongmen, what marks D’Antoni is his stony optimism and the creative freedom he gives his team. “If I throw one into the stands,” Nash once told me, “he knows I’m trying for something special, not just screwing around and being careless. Guys play hard for coaches who believe in them, and his greatest strength is giving that to his players.”
As players from other teams are well aware. “Every kid we brought in for predraft workouts said they badly wanted to play for Mike,” says Jonathan Supranowitz, the Knicks vice president of public relations. “Not, ‘I want to play at the Garden’ or ‘I love New York’; it was Mike and his energy. And as we go forward and get out from under the salary cap, it’ll be Mike’s reputation that really makes us players [in the big free-agent market] in two years.”
...What followed was an anatomy of a death foretold. Less than a month into the 2007–’08 season there was a screaming match between D’Antoni and the new GM there, Steve Kerr. “Steve went in to make suggestions about the defense, and Mike just exploded,” says Paul Coro, the Suns beat writer for the Arizona Republic. Tensions between the two men simmered all season, and though D’Antoni had actually stumped for the midyear trade that brought Shaq O’Neal west for Shawn Marion, it was widely seen as being forced down his throat by an undermining front office. D’Antoni, rubbed raw, barked at sports-talk callers who criticized his bench rotations, and went upstairs to backbite the guys who called the Suns’ games on TV. After game one in the first-round playoff series against the Spurs, in which D’Antoni got burned by a decision not to foul and blew a win the Suns had in the bag, “I barely recognized him,” says a Suns’ insider. “He wasn’t his personable, insightful self, and he felt really betrayed by the second-guessers.” The Suns went on to lose that series in five games.
"I was pretty disillusioned,” says D’Antoni, who was given permission by Phoenix to seek another job. “I thought, after all I’ve done here, the three division titles, this is what I get from you? Well, fine, I’ll take my ball and go home.”
