SPACE, SPEED AND SMARTS
NBA’s current offensive explosion can be traced to a gamble in style of play that has since caught fire
Even as Mike D’Antoni was about to change the NBA forever, he wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing.
In the weeks leading up to the start of the 2004-05 season, D’Antoni, then entering his first full season as head coach of the Phoenix Suns, was planning on doing something the NBA hadn’t seen before. With recently signed point guard Steve Nash at the controls, D’Antoni was hoping to play a brand of small ball that was decidedly against conventional wisdom. By moving 6-foot-7 wing Shawn Marion to power forward and 6-foot-10 power forward Amar’e Stoudemire to centre, D’Antoni was hoping to space the floor with shooters around Stoudemire’s deadly ability in the pick and roll and run opponents off the court with superior speed and quickness.
But even though D’Antoni, who became a legendary player in Italy, believed this was the way to play, he was having trouble convincing himself he could make such a massive break from basketball convention until he had a conversation with Jerry and Bryan Colangelo, the father-son duo then running the Suns.
“When I talked to Bryan and Jerry and said, ‘God, you know, I’m a little stuck because I want to go this way, but I don’t know. It’s not traditional,’” D’Antoni, now coach of the Houston Rockets, said in a recent phone interview. “And they go, ‘Mike, do what you think’s best and don’t worry about anything. Do what you think is right.’ ... They gave the final nod to try it, because I had no idea.”
It turned out D’Antoni had the perfect idea. In today’s NBA, playing small with multiple shooters spread across the half court isn’t just a feasible way to play; it’s the preferred way to build a team. More than a decade later, then, the ripple effects from D’Antoni’s decision to introduce to the NBA a new way to play are still being felt, as the league heads into the second half of the 2016-17 regular season with a level of offensive production unseen in decades.
Russell Westbrook is on pace to become the first player since Oscar Robertson, in 1962, to average a triple-double for a season. On the heels of Stephen Curry becoming the first player to surpass not only 300 three-pointers in a season but 400, finishing with 402 last year, the league is firing triples at an unprecedented rate. Lumbering 7-foot centres jack them up like players a foot shorter. Virtually every team is trying to play smaller and faster and get up more perimeter shots, eschewing the traditional path of playing through dominant centres and relying on defence. Even Sunday’s All-Star Game in New Orleans followed the trend, as a free-flowing series of dunks and threes allowed the West to emerge with a 192-182 victory and Anthony Davis to earn MVP honours with a record-setting 52 points.
The league has arrived at this moment because of a 15-year evolution focused around three key aspects, all of which have taken the sport from the rough-and-tumble fisticuffs that defined the 1990s to the free-flowing game of today: space, speed and smarts.
While D’Antoni’s Phoenix teams get much of the credit for reshaping the way the sport is played, the beginnings of today’s offensive explosion can be traced back to something that had happened a couple of years earlier: the elimination of the illegal-defence rule in 2001.
The decade leading up to the rule change had become defined by isolation basketball. Superstars such as Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson had perfected the art of isolating a defender on one side of the court and then scoring in bunches while their teammates stood around and watched.
But while some looked at eliminating the illegal-defence rule as a way to promote ball movement and open up the game, others — such as Miami Heat coach Pat Riley, who had perfected the way to play under those rules with the Heat and New York Knicks in the 1990s — thought that changing the rules to allow for zone defences would actually slow the game down further.
“Before, I mean, people would just stand out above the top of the key and isolate somebody on the wing or on the low post, and the only thing you could do was come double-team or stay where you were,” Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy, then working as an assistant under Riley, said recently. “You couldn’t get down in the lane or things like that, and so at first I know the thinking of all of us was, ‘That should really give an edge to the defence.’ “
Instead, Van Gundy said, it did something else: It forced coaches to begin to think differently about offence.
“What it sparked was we can’t play offence the same way,” Van Gundy said. “That isolation game is not going to work now.”
But while the illegal-defence change helped, an equally important shift was removing defenders’ ability to hand-check before that 2004-05 season. This change promoted freedom of movement for the individual players, just as the illegal-defence change promoted more ball movement.
Anyone who sees footage of one of the games between those Knicks and Heat teams in the 1990s will immediately notice how physical defenders are, riding offensive players all the way down the court.
The new landscape proved fertile for fresh ideas, primed for someone to take advantage of the new rules. In stepped D’Antoni and his Suns. To say people were skeptical of D’Antoni’s tempo-pushing plans is an understatement.
“Everybody was telling me it wouldn’t work,” D’Antoni said. “They were telling me all year. The biggest thing I was hearing was that I was going to destroy their careers, that I was going to hurt them. ‘They can’t play that way, they won’t last til December, they won’t last til February, they won’t last til March.’
“But we just kept going, and it worked and it worked.”
The 2004-05 Suns weren’t supposed to become the NBA’s next powerhouse. When Nash signed a six-year, $63 million contract with Phoenix that summer, the deal was seen as a huge risk. The Suns had won just 29 games the year before, and D’Antoni had gone 21-40 after taking over early in that season.
By playing small, though, and with Nash at the controls, the Suns suddenly were blazing a trail that left everyone else struggling to keep up — both in terms of pace of play, as D’Antoni’s famed “Seven Seconds or Less” offence had Phoenix playing faster than everyone else — and wins. Phoenix began the year 31-4 and went on to tie a franchise record with 62 wins, reaching the Western Conference finals for the first of two straight seasons. Nash also won the first of two consecutive most valuable player awards.
For D’Antoni, getting off to the fast start was essential, since it proved that the plan could work. Struggling out of the gate might have forced him to pivot.
It was a reaction the rest of the league shared. While D’Antoni’s teams didn’t wind up winning a championship during his fouryear run in Phoenix — thanks in part to a series of unlucky breaks along the way — it didn’t take long for others to embrace his vision.
Van Gundy took over the Orlando Magic in the summer of 2007 and inherited a team with a franchise centrepiece in Dwight Howard, the game’s dominant big man at the time. Howard was a pickand-roll monster offensively and the league’s best defensive player by a significant margin. It was the perfect setting to employ a variation on D’Antoni’s scheme.
In 2009, Orlando reached the NBA Finals playing a similar style, spacing four perimeter players around Howard. Rashard Lewis, a small forward, most notably played as the team’s power forward.
The success of Phoenix and Orlando began to affect the league’s collective psyche. Teams saw that those teams weren’t simply exceptions to the norm but, in the process, had discovered the best way to play the game under the new rules. Soon multiple teams, and star players, were following suit.
LeBron James and Chris Bosh — career small and power forwards, respectively — moved to power forward and centre when their Miami Heat teams were at their best. Draymond Green’s ascension into the starting lineup in Golden State, triggered by an injury to incumbent starter David Lee, was a catalyst that helped convert the Warriors from a good team into the league’s best.
During this time, use of data began to creep more and more into the basketball world, further allowing teams to tailor strategies in more effective ways, in a manner easily digestible for coaches and players.
The biggest impact has come in shot distribution. Players and coaches from previous eras lament the “loss” of the mid-range shot — jumpers 10 to 20 feet from the basket — from today’s game, saying it’s a fundamental art that has been lost to layups or threepointers. The data, however, shows that those mid-range shots are the least efficient shots in basketball; shooting fewer directly correlates to improved offensive output.
That was something D’Antoni brought to the league in Phoenix and that the data confirmed. Now, as the coach of the Rockets, he has unleashed a barrage of threes and turned James Harden into an MVP candidate in the role Nash had played a decade earlier.
Pace of play has gradually increased since the 2004-05 season, to the point where the movement is now creating far more possessions in each game — in turn leading to the proliferation of tripledoubles by stars such as Westbrook and Harden.
The increase in data, and the quest for efficiency, has given teams a road map that coaches could only guess at 15 years earlier.
Even though the innovations didn’t deliver championships to D’Antoni personally, they did pave the way for others.
When Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra won his first championship as a head coach, in 2012, he texted D’Antoni and thanked him. And when Steve Kerr and former Suns assistant Alvin Gentry won a championship with the Warriors in 2015, they, too, credited D’Antoni for starting the NBA down the path it is now on.
“I was just excited,” D’Antoni said of the appreciation from other coaches. “Excited for them, excited that the way we wanted to play wasn’t totally off. I think that’s the biggest thing ... that I’m not crazy and I’m not completely wrong.”
Everybody was telling me it wouldn’t work ... The biggest thing I was hearing was that I was going to destroy their careers.