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PresIke
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Joined: 7/26/2001
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Posted by knicks1248:
Posted by PresIke:
Beck and Araton from the NY Times were supportive, but also balanced by suggesting that no one is expecting a miracle. Actually, their pieces were amongst the most detailed I read when it came to examining his career.
can you post that article No problem. May 12, 2008
Expect D’Antoni to Defy Expectations
By HOWARD BECK
Mike D’Antoni was born in a tiny West Virginia town and became the greatest point guard in Italian League history. He barely played in the N.B.A., but is now one of its best coaches. He forced an entire league to reconsider what good basketball is.
So when D’Antoni left the Phoenix Suns this weekend to join the Knicks — trading an All-Star lineup for a roster of misfits, leaving perhaps the league’s most stable franchise for perhaps its most dysfunctional — it was not the most unlikely event of his life.
Much of D’Antoni’s biography defies conventional expectations. He is fluent in Italian and holds a dual citizenship. He has logged more court time in Milan and Treviso than in Milwaukee and Cleveland. He is a co-author of two books.
And sometime soon, he may just crush every preconceived notion about who he is, what he does and what he can accomplish in the N.B.A. At least that will be D’Antoni’s hope, and his mission, when he is introduced this week as the Knicks’ 24th head coach.
Like anyone who achieves quick fame and adulation, D’Antoni has become saddled by his own clichéd reputation. He is known as an innovator and an entertainer, an advocate of shooting the ball in seven seconds or less, an evangelist of high-octane basketball, a true believer that a fast-and-furious offense can trump a great defense.
That sticky narrative is accurate, if incomplete. D’Antoni has not always favored small lineups, high-volume shooting and breakneck basketball. He did not coach that system during his one season with Denver (in 1999) and did not adopt it in Phoenix until he got the ideal point guard to run it, Steve Nash.
But D’Antoni prefers the quick pace, and will surely try to find the players to run it at Madison Square Garden. If the Knicks are not fit to play run-and-gun — and the current lineup is not — D’Antoni will find another way.
“He is confident in the things that he wants to accomplish,” said Maurizio Gherardini, D’Antoni’s former general manager with Benetton Treviso. “But he’s a passionate basketball student and he knows how to adjust to situations, still following his beliefs.”
News that D’Antoni might join the Knicks drew snickers across the league. The Knicks’ starting big men, Zach Randolph and Eddy Curry, may not cross halfcourt in seven seconds or less.
But D’Antoni’s tenure with Treviso is instructive. That team once featured the 7-footers Denis Marconato and Roberto Chiacig, who played in tandem about 50 percent of the time. It was admittedly not the lineup D’Antoni would have preferred, said Gherardini, now the assistant general manager for the Toronto Raptors.
But D’Antoni “ended up doing the right thing — to grow them, to develop them and to play a different kind of basketball,” Gherardini said, “because you have to adjust. For as much as he believes in the things that he does, I think he has the quality to adjust.”
D’Antoni’s philosophy was forged over more than two decades as a player and coach in Italy, from 1976 to 1997. The international game favors a higher tempo, more improvisation and ball movement. As a point guard, D’Antoni was regarded as something of an artist, the Magic Johnson of Europe.
D’Antoni led Milan to five Italian League titles and two Cups of Europe, became the club’s scoring leader and was voted the top point guard in league history in 1990. This year, D’Antoni was named one of the “50 Greatest Contributors in Euroleague History.” As a coach, D’Antoni led Treviso to the Cup of Europe in 1995 and to the Italian League championship in 2002.
“He was a very, very brainy point guard,” said Gherardini, who followed D’Antoni’s playing career from the start. “He’s truly a basketball legend overseas.”
D’Antoni is unwavering in his belief that a run-and-gun team can win the N.B.A. championship. The more that notion has been challenged, the more insistent D’Antoni has become.
But D’Antoni was also a driving force for the trade that brought Shaquille O’Neal, the hulking former All-Star, to the Suns in February. O’Neal’s arrival signaled a drastic shift, if not an end, to the Suns’ frenetic personality.
The experiment ended badly, as the Suns lost to the San Antonio Spurs in five games in the opening round of the playoffs — the only first-round exit in D’Antoni’s four seasons. The defeat hastened D’Antoni’s breakup with the Suns and reinforced several criticisms of his coaching: that he is cavalier about defense, inattentive to detail and does not hold his players accountable.
D’Antoni resisted the request of the Suns’ management to hire a defensive coach. It is believed that he may do so in New York. D’Antoni’s Suns practices were famously brief, often less than an hour. But he also had several veterans, led by Nash, and D’Antoni preferred that they expend their energy in games rather than on the practice court.
D’Antoni is affable and easygoing (he is a favorite with the news media) and is regarded as a classic players’ coach. In a Sports Illustrated poll, D’Antoni tied with Phil Jackson of the Los Angeles Lakers as the coach players most wanted to play for. But his friendly demeanor is sometimes misinterpreted as the sign of an ineffectual leader.
“Is he a players’ coach? Yeah. But that idea about a lack of discipline I think is nutty,” said Jack McCallum, a Sports Illustrated writer who wrote the definitive book on the D’Antoni era in Phoenix, “7 Seconds or Less.” McCallum spent the 2005-6 season as an unofficial assistant, attending coaches’ meetings, practices and games.
“He holds people accountable. He hollers at people. He has a temper,” McCallum said, recalling postgame blowups at Raja Bell and Shawn Marion.
D’Antoni takes a light touch at practice. But in games, he “transforms into an ubercompetitor and you can’t mess with him,” McCallum said. “So as far as players walking over him and all of that, that’s nonsense. There’s nobody tougher than Raja Bell, and that guy had his total respect.”
The challenges in New York will be greater. D’Antoni inherits a team that won 23 games this season, that has not had a winning season in seven years and that has no established culture of accountability.
A roster overhaul is inevitable, whether D’Antoni chooses to replicate the Suns’ system or adopt a more traditional approach. But it seems certain that Curry, Randolph and Quentin Richardson will have to get in shape, Nate Robinson will have to follow directions and Stephon Marbury will have to make a case to stay.
“Guys do not walk over D’Antoni; he was the boss of that team,” McCallum said, referring to the Suns. “And he will be the boss of the New York Knicks, too.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company and May 11, 2008
Sports of The Times
It’s the End of the World as the Knicks Know It
By HARVEY ARATON
The sentiment was understandably strong for the slick-passing and smooth-talking Mark Jackson, out of Queens, N.Y., and St. John’s University and Madison Square Garden. But here is what Donnie Walsh, himself of the Bronx, had to be thinking once it was apparent that Mike D’Antoni, late of the Phoenix Suns, was also in play, available for hire as the coach of the Knicks:
Why not get the guy who has been around, and not just around the Midtown block? Time to bring this anachronistic franchise into the new world of professional basketball, the whole wide world that D’Antoni has lived in as much as anyone born into the game in the United States.
Much as they were absent a coach, the Knicks have been lacking a vision. They needed to open themselves up to the way the sport is not only played but administered in more open-minded and successful N.B.A. cities. As the general manager in New York until December 2003, Scott Layden was rooted in a 1980s mentality. As team president, Isiah Thomas never could get his head out of his own hometown, Chicago.
Globalization took root in the N.B.A. years ago, but somehow eluded one of the great melting pots. With the signing of D’Antoni to replace Thomas, Walsh makes a statement that the Knicks will no longer play the paradoxical role of 21st century hicks.
A marginal N.B.A. player after a college career at Marshall, D’Antoni drifted over to Italy, where he became a star guard, an icon in Milan, a boyhood hero of a future prodigy, the gifted son of another American who had drifted overseas. Kobe Bryant always said his first Lakers jersey, No. 8, was worn in tribute to Mike D’Antoni.
Later, D’Antoni became a top coach in the Italian league, twice coach of the year. He had a brief and unsuccessful coaching fling with the Denver Nuggets, returned to Italy, then was hired as an assistant in Phoenix in the fall of 2002.
There was a night that season when D’Antoni, in Denver with the Suns, stepped out for dinner at a sushi restaurant with a Nuggets rookie named Nikoloz Tskitishvili. I was with them, working on a story about the influx of international players, focusing on the Georgian-born Tskitishvili, who had played the previous season for Benetton Treviso, under D’Antoni.
When the subject turned to the evolving basketball world, D’Antoni spoke passionately about how much the American game needed to open up, distance itself from the hand-to-hand combat that too many control-freak coaches had allowed it to become. He marveled about the abilities of the big men overseas to handle and shoot the ball, play outside the paint, open up the court.
He promised that if he ever got another opportunity to be an N.B.A. coach, he would embrace a freewheeling, up-tempo style, not just because it would be an aesthetically pleasing contrast, but because he believed the global effect on the American game was going to re-emphasize athleticism and fundamental skills. D’Antoni soon after delivered on his vow, although not until Thomas was nice enough to take Stephon Marbury off his hands and Steve Nash hit town.
D’Antoni’s Suns blew through the league like a cool desert breeze, even if they never did reach the finals. The unsold critic could retrospectively call them a gimmick made to be exposed in the playoffs. The kinder, gentler one might say that San Antonio, another team with a strong foreign influence that changed stylistically with the times, had Tim Duncan as the difference maker.
In his own defense, D’Antoni could certainly argue that the Suns might well have been the defending champions this season had the league not horrendously suspended his players for leaving the bench in the playoffs last spring after they were baited by the Spurs’ Robert Horry.
However you remember his Suns, whatever system D’Antoni installs in New York, the Knicks won’t be winners until Thomas’s roster is turned over, until better and more coachable players are found. D’Antoni is the latest to hit the Dolan family jackpot, but he will work and suffer and lose aplenty for the extra money Chicago apparently wouldn’t pay him if Eddy Curry, Zach Randolph and the rest of the career underachievers are still in the house.
The heavy lifting around the Garden will first happen in the front office. Maybe Walsh has a job there in mind for Jackson, who played for him in Indiana, whom Walsh was once ready to draft 21 years ago until Reggie Miller was suddenly in his lap, the way D’Antoni materialized last week.
It wouldn’t hurt Walsh to have another savvy New Yorker on his new management team. Better to make his first Knicks hire a basketball man of the world.
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company [Edited by - PresIke on 05-12-2008 11:12 PM][Edited by - PresIke on 05-12-2008 11:13 PM]Forum Po Po and #33 for a reason...
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5/12/2008 10:22 PM