Grading Coach D’Antoni

December 3, 2007 by Mike Olbinski

Guest Blogger: Old Dirt McGirt

When he first took the Suns job, Mike D’Antoni was heralded as an offensive genius who was destined to save the NBA from plodding defensive half court basketball and finally lead the Suns to their first NBA title. However, as the seasons progressed, it seems as if we find different and more excruciating ways to lose.

While some can be passed off as freak occurrences, it is hard to blame three seasons of ultimate futility on the powers of fate. Although this season is still young, there have been some frightening trends that Suns fans are all two familiar with. A lack of execution when Steve Nash is out, two many minutes for our starters, spotty defensive rotations, and a neglect of taking care of business on the boards.

These can all be attributed to D’Antoni, who spurns defense and rebounding, and encourages a rigid style of play that has come back to bite us each year.

While minutes, D, rebounding, and a poor bench are specific problems, D’Antoni’s ultimate failing as head coach has been our inflexibility in style of play. We have all of the right personnel to be successful at whatever approach the game situation deems necessary; we’ve got a premier passer in Steve Nash and a dominant inside presence in Amare Stoudemire, accompanied with good passers in Hill and Diaw and three point marksmen in Bell and Barbosa to succeed at the halfcourt, and we can run out a lineup of Stoudemire-Skinner-Marion-Diaw/Hill/Bell-Nash to be able to bang and play big, as well as the ability to run and play showtime ball with Stoudemire-Marion-Bell-Barbosa-Nash.

Yet D’Antoni seems unmovable in his desire to only run, sometimes at the detriment to our team.

The premier coaches in the league with Phil Jackson, Jerry Sloan, and Gregg Popovich will change their team’s style with whatever the circumstances of the game dictate. We saw Sloan go from a tough half court style against the Rockets in last years playoffs, to running the fastest team in the NBA in Golden State out of the gym in the next round.

The Spurs also have utilized a small lineup to barrage their opponents with threes, and then seamlessly transition to grind it out pace with a few substitutions.

However, whenever teams put the stops on our fast break and turn Nash into a scorer thus stagnating the offense, the team invariably falters. While during the regular season we can typically impose our will opposing (and usually lesser) squad, when faced with the elite teams (and the elite coaches) in the playoffs, we can never seem to adapt our game to whatever situations we might find ourselves in.

We’re at the mercy of our jump shooters, and when the ball isn’t finding the cylinder, we look helpless.
Stemming from the style issue, is our inability to execute when Nash is out of the game. Let’s face it; despite what naysayers might think, we cannot run this type of high powered offense effectively without number thirteen running the show.

It’s not as if we’re weak at back up guard either. Leandro Barbosa is the reigning sixth man of the year, and while he might be more of a two, Marcus Banks was showing signs of talent in Minnesota before he signed with Phoenix, and now the dreadful Erik Piatkowski is getting minutes over him. The problem is while both Barbosa and Banks are solid players (more so for Barbosa), neither of them are good playmakers, and in an offense that relies so heavily on having a floor general/distributor for a point guard, we look terrible when Nash is out.

We should stop running a bastardized run and gun with Boris Diaw playing the role of distributor, he just frankly is not good enough and the last thing he deserves is added responsibility (at least until he can show that he can make a layup).

We need to slow down the game, feed Amare down low and have both Banks and Barbosa slash to the basket, which they’re much more suited to do than play the role of traditional passing point guard.

Grant Hill can also really help us in the half court during these situations as we saw with the last game against the Knicks were he took over the beginning of the fourth quarter and basically put New York away with Nash still lying on the floor.

However, while there was progress with our Nash-less play in the Knicks game, we really didn’t see much in terms of guarding the low post and not allowing offensive rebounds. While New York’s tandem of the king size Zach Randolph and Eddy Curry are pretty hard to handle for anyone, they still managed to get position on our defense and punish us in the paint… that is until Z-Bo turned into Z-Bo and started hucking up bad shots at the detriment to his offense.

That said, this isn’t all of D’Antoni’s fault, as neither Marion or Stoudemire are very good low post defenders who can body up on the Elton Brands, Tim Duncans, and Carlos Boozers of the world. We’ve got to double team, aggressively front these players, and give Brian Skinner some more minutes in order to help stop them.

Speaking of our defense, as we saw in the recent Golden State game, the low post isn’t our only failing in that area. Frankly, our rotations are pitiful at times, and we have serious trouble with stopping opposing guards from getting into the paint sometimes. It’s not as if we don’t have the personnel to be a solid defensive team either; Shawn Marion, Raja Bell, Brian Skinner, and Grant Hill are all great to decent defenders, and Leandro has shown a lot of progress in that area so far into the season.

We just need to not be focused on offense and on running off of every missed shot, so that we can make good, crisp rotations and contest every attempt.

Also, like in seasons past, we struggle with finding some toughness and grit on the defensive end.

During the Golden State game, the Warriors were pretty much getting to the basket at will, and it would have been nice to see somebody on the Suns send one of the Warriors into the third row of the bleachers. Our mentality on defense should be what Raja said in seven seconds, “we ain’t nobodies hoes”.

And then there’s the bench. If there is anything sacred in the NBA, it should be that under absolutely no circumstances, should Grant Hill play 40 minutes a game. I don’t care if he said the injuries were because of practices, or he looks healthy this year, he shouldn’t be out on the court for thirty minutes period. While he’s definitely a good addition to this team, during certain games (especially Golden State), he just looks exhausted and ends up leaving a bunch of his shots short and turning the ball over.

The same goes with Steve Nash (who, admittedly, D’Antoni has been better with is minutes as of late).

In fact none of our starters should be playing 40 minutes a game except in very special circumstances. It’s okay if we force the bench to work things out for themselves and lose a few regular season games if all of our big guns are well rested and ready to ball come the playoffs.

Speaking of our bench players, in this season as in all previous under D’Antoni, we’ve become infatuated with a short rotation. It’s not as if we don’t have the talent. DJ Strawberry looked very sharp in the preseason, Marcus Banks was solid in Minnesota, and Sean Marks was supposed to play a role this season. Yet these guys rarely ever get minutes, and if they do it’s either in a blowout or incredibly sporadic.

Let the young guys earn their stripes instead of letting them waste away on the bench (especially if we’re going to be playing Eric Piatkowski). D’Antoni seems infatuated on playing every regular season game like it’s game seven of the NBA finals. A strong bench could still come in handy during the playoffs when you need somebody to step in and produce… or in the very rare circumstance that two of your rotation players are going to be suspended.

But of course that would never happen.

The main thing that I look at when judging Coach D is to see whether or not he’s improved and learned from the mistakes of prior seasons.

With some exceptions, like Nash’s minutes, the outlook isn’t bright here. Grant Hill might be a nice addition, but he does very little in the way of rescuing us from our demons of rebounding and defense, and D’Antoni’s stubbornness and narrow minded philosophies certainly don’t help matters.

Sure we’ll always have a fighting chance with the great Steve Nash calling the shots, but I wonder how much better we could be with a coach understanding of flexibility, bench play, and defense would do with this group, who is undeniably the most individually talented squad in the league.

I’d like nothing more than to be wrong about D’Antoni and to see Steve Nash hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy this summer, but as of right now I don’t have a good feeling about it.

Posted in mike d'antoni, nba, basketball, phoenix suns