ONE FOUR ALL
FROM THE OWNER TO GM TO STAR, THE ROCKETS BELIEVE IN COACH’S VISION OF HOW TO PLAY AND WIN IN TODAY’S NBA
Mike D’Antoni preached, and the choir in Rockets gear sang along. • He tends to do that when given the chance to share the gospel from the book of pace-and-space offense, but that was what was expected in a job interview. • D’Antoni shared what he believed. He talked about the Rockets’ offense, even declaring that if he were to become their coach, James Harden would be his point guard. He spoke of shooting nothing but 3-pointers and layups as if he were Daryl Morey calling into a talk show before pledging to hang up and listen. • Leslie Alexander ate it up.
“I still think, ‘That’s what I wanted,’ ” said Alexander, the Rockets’ owner for nearly 24 years. “I think it all the time. I watch the games. I think, ‘This is the way to play. This is the way to win.’ I want to win.”
The Rockets went “all in” on D’Antoni’s style and then pushed the envelope. If they shoot 40 3s, he wants them to take 50. If they finish five pick-and-roll dunks, he wants five more.
In a career spent putting up numbers and changing NBA offenses, D’Antoni has never found a franchise as devoted to his philosophies as the Rockets.
But it is about more than merely embracing his approach and methods, he said. For the first time in D’Antoni’s career, he has an owner, general manager and best player as faithful, as completely devoted, to the style as he is. More than that, D’Antoni has greater conviction than he ever has.
Alexander, Harden and Morey — himself such a disciple of the style that it had been called “Moreyball” — were all on board. When D’Antoni cites reasons for the Rockets’ offensive success, ranking as the NBA’s second-best offense this season and one of the best ever, he routinely points to the harmony among the franchise’s leaders.
“You do have to have the players and the talent, but … everybody has to get in line — the management, the star players, the coaches, the owner,” D’Antoni said. “Everybody wants to play a certain way. It is different, and it was weird. Now it’s catching on.”
Period of doubt
There was a time when even D’Antoni was not so sure. When his Phoenix Suns revolutionized NBA offenses, he often second-guessed himself. He had downsized his frontcourt, much as the Rockets do now, but he was so far ahead of the trend toward shooting 3s and in-the-lane 2s with no in between, he backed off.
Eventually, the Suns traded for Shaquille O’Neal, and the experiment was bequeathed to others.
“Golden State knocked down the door and became champions, and the analytics people started asserting their will and showed that’s the way to go,” D’Antoni said. “(The Suns) would take 25 3s or 30 3s and think that was too many and get scared and backed off a little bit when actually, we should have gone faster and done more.”
When D’Antoni’s last general manager in Phoenix, Steve Kerr, became the Golden State coach, pace and space, and 3-pointers put up in record-setting quantities — records broken this season by the Rockets — won.
“It’s similar, but Mike has said it himself. He’s all in now,” Kerr said of the similarities between D’Antoni’s Rockets and the ground-breaking Suns. “We were unsure if we were going to be able to win. We won at a high level but didn’t win the whole thing. We ended up breaking stride and traded for Shaq. We weren’t convinced we could do it.
“Here, maybe it’s because of the way the league is trending the last decade, Mike is all in. It’s the same stuff but like on steroids.”
Winning over Alexander came first but might have been easiest. Alexander did not know just what he wanted in a coach after last season. But he knew what he liked.
“He told me what he believes in,” Alexander said of D’Antoni. “That was exactly in sync with what I believe in. I’ve thought for the last 15, 20 years, you have to run and shoot 3s to win in this league. I don’t think you win without it.
“He was out there alone on an island. Everyone was negative against him. When that happens, you doubt yourself. ‘Maybe I’m wrong, and everyone else is right.’ He told me he was going to do that when we first met. It’s what I believe.”
Alexander said he has disagreed with some of his coaches over the years (he would not share names or instances) but never meddled.
“When you hire a coach, you have to give him discretion in how he is coaching the team,” he said. “I’m not a coach.”
The owner’s interest in the style, however, dates to when D’Antoni was still the innovative mastermind of the Suns and the Rockets were built around Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady.
“I go back to when I was hired by Leslie in 2006,” Morey said. “He was talking about playing this way: up-tempo, spread the floor, shoot from distance. He always thought there was a better way to play. At that time, I didn’t think our roster fit that. He thought we could do that more than we did. From day one, Leslie wanted to play this way. And from day one, Leslie had interest in Mike.
“We were a pretty good team, and Phoenix would come in and wipe the floor with us. When we had openings, he wasn’t available to hire. When he was available, he was somebody we wanted to talk to. Through the process, it became clearer and clearer that we thought he could be the guy that could deliver Leslie’s vision and could win.”
With Alexander and Morey on board, Harden was next, though D’Antoni suspects that had Harden objected to the point-guard plan, someone else would be his coach.
“I wouldn’t have gotten the job if he didn’t want to do it,” D’Antoni said. “We wanted to put him at point guard. A little risky, but his skill set screams it. He went further with it than I thought. His passing ability and the way he controls the game, elite point guards do that. If you have a great point guard, you have a good team.”
Quick sell
Harden was sold quickly. He had been celebrated as a scorer but always was an eager passer. Even at Arizona State, one of the games he loved most was against a box-and-one when his teammates carried the offense. In his first season in Houston, he said his favorite play is when he reads the defense and sets up teammates to exploit it.
D’Antoni told him he could double last season’s career-best assist average of 7.5 per game. Harden returned to Los Angeles and told buddies at that day’s pickup game of the plan. They thought D’Antoni was nuts, but Harden was intrigued. And sold.
“From the beginning of our conversa- tions about me being a point guard and since then, everything he said, I believe,” Harden said. “I never doubt him. It was already my tastes. He just gave me the platform to go out and do it. That’s all it was. He knew what I had. He knew what I could do. He just said, ‘Here’s the ball.’ He’s done a great job all year of letting me go out there and be me.
“If I think he’s crazy, I’d tell him. And vice versa. If he sees me doing something he doesn’t like, he’ll tell me. That’s the relationship we have. We want the best for each other. That’s all you can ask.”
With that, D’Antoni had a star fully embracing his plan, a general manager hungrily filling a roster with talent that fits the style, and an owner who would never ask for something more conventional. Players embraced a plan that fit them, with none of the dysfunction of a year ago when Harden wanted to play one way, Dwight Howard another and the roster did not fit the Moreyball style.
In New York, the Knicks traded for Carmelo Anthony, a post-up player squeezed awkwardly into D’Antoni’s no-post offense. In Los Angeles, he had Kobe Bryant, a devotee of Phil Jackson’s triangle, and Howard, who believed he should be in the low blocks. Even Phoenix eventually made the deal for O’Neal.
When asked if he has had players who have resisted, the always loquacious D’Antoni could barely speak and carefully resisted details.
“Ohhhhh yeah,” D’Antoni said. “Oh yeah. It’s amazing how that is. Oh yeah. Yup, yup, yup.”
In his fifth NBA coaching job, he found what every coach wants.
“I was really lucky to find this job that the owner, the general manager and the players all want to play the same way,” D’Antoni said.
Finally, the fight was over. D’Antoni no longer needed to convince the unconverted to join him. Believers already were in place.
“It makes a difference,” Morey said. “Mike’s had to fight for it. It’s not always been that the players believed in it, management believed in it, ownership believed in it. Even he started to doubt when they got eliminated.
“To be somewhere the owner’s always wanted to play that way and was instrumental in getting him hired and there is data to back it up and we had the confidence we’d be able to deliver the right players for what Mike wanted to do, it’s been a huge factor in everything working.”