When Mike D’Antoni took over the Phoenix Suns in 2004-05 his plan was to revolutionize what was an increasingly stale, stagnant product, that being NBA offences.
Out with isolation basketball and occasional three-point shooting that was the rule in the league then; in with playing fast – the unofficial motto was ‘seven-seconds-or-less’ as in, don’t let the shot clock get below 16 – and shooting threes at never-before-seen rates and run, run, run.
The Suns, who went 62-20, were a revelation and in Steve Nash – who won his first of two MVP awards that year – D’Antoni found his muse at point guard.
There have been plenty of twists and turns on the NBA’s road to fun and gun – in stops in New York and Los Angeles since D’Antoni was fired, his genius label tattered – but it’s safe to argue with the Houston Rockets in town Sunday night for their second meeting with the Toronto Raptors that the revolution is complete. No team has pinned its fortunes on the idea of spreading the floor, pushing the pace and letting their point guard dictate the game more than the Rockets have this season.
And it’s working.
“We have formula and we stick to it,” said D’Antoni, whose Rockets are the NBA’s hottest team and proved it with their 129-122 win over the Raptors.
In Rockets MVP candidate James Harden, D’Antoni has a Steve Nash from the future, except where Nash scored reluctantly, Harden is comfortable generating chances for his teammates by forcing defense to lock in on him as a scorer first. The result is a season for the ages, his 40 points, 10 rebounds and 11 assists against Toronto just the latest chapter.
“Now they have Harden playing in the mold of Steve Nash – bigger, probably stronger going to the rim, probably a better shooter — a more willing shooter than Steve was,” said Raptors head coach Dwane Casey, sounding a bit overwhelmed.
Their win over a tired Raptors squad improved the Rockets to 30-9 and 19-2 in their past 21 games. The Raptors (24-12), playing their third game in four nights and on the second night of a back-to-back, hung with Houston early, buoyed perhaps by the return to the lineup of Patrick Patterson, who had missed four games with a strained knee.
The Raptors led 63-61 at half in large part because the Rockets shot just 2-of-17 from three, not that they were going to stop.
Does D’Antoni even notice the misses?
“I notice that when I’m in at halftime crying,” said D’Antoni. “But we’re not going to change anything. All I told them was that they would eventually fall, because we’re not going to be 2-for-40, and we’ll take 40. Eventually we’ll get some of them.”
The second half was a little predictable. The Rockets kept shooting from deep – five-of-13 in the third quarter alone – on their way to 11-of-38 for the game, and slowly the Raptors defence, over-stretched, broke down.
Rockets bring a certain kind of relentlessness that is hard to defend, other than hoping they miss.
“You know you’re going to face three-point shots, you know that going in,” said Casey. “But on top of that it’s the range they shoot them. It’s not like they’re on the line. They’re three or four steps back … it’s one of those things where ‘he’s not going to shoot it.’
“Well yes he is.”
There are all sorts of signs of the influence of D’Antoni’s old Suns teams, beyond his new Rockets club. The last two NBA championships have been won by Golden State and Cleveland, respectively. Each is a club that shoots threes at rates the early D’Antoni Suns could only dream about, suggesting that up-tempo, perimeter-oriented basketball isn’t just tenable in the playoffs, but a necessity.
Another?
When Nash was pushing the pace for D’Antoni the Suns used 95.9 possessions per game, which seemed like a lot when the league average was 90.9.
This season the league’s average pace is 96.2, meaning virtually the entire league is playing at a pace that made the Suns and D’Antoni seem like iconoclasts just 12 years ago.
And the Rockets? Under D’Antoni’s guidance they are at the cutting edge again. They are averaging nearly 40 three-point attempts a game and set the NBA record against the New Orleans Pelicans on Dec. 16th as they made 24 threes while taking 61 in a 122-100 win.
“The NBA today is ball movement and speed,” Rockets owner Leslie Alexander said at D’Antoni’s introductory press conference, giving him one more chance to prove that his style of play can last. “Mike is one of the real experts at that.”
He’s forced converts along the way; the math being hard to argue. If one team is playing really fast and shooting lots of shots worth three points at a reasonable rate, it’s really hard to beat it by taking less shots worth only two points. If both teams are playing that way, the numbers can really climb.
The Raptors did their part on Sunday night, putting up 25 threes and making 11 to match Houston.
“He [D’Antoni] should be smiling all the time because everybody now is trying to play like that,” said Casey who has slowly come around to the need to play faster and shoot more from downtown. “Back when he first started it was, ‘oh, they shoot too many threes.’ Well, that’s the new norm now.”
The Raptors are averaging 95 possessions a game this year, up from 89 in Casey’s first season in Toronto and a number that has increased every year he’s coached here, though Toronto still ranks just 21st in the league in that category. The Raptors are second in the league in offensive efficiency and rank ahead of the Rockets because they never turn it over (well, except for last night when the coughed up 19 turnovers for 26 points), make the threes they do take, and get to the foul line a lot. There’s more than one way to score.
But they are on pace to shoot 2,009 threes this year, up from slightly from a year ago but just 22nd in the NBA. It’s worth noting too that D’Antoni’s first Suns team turned the NBA upside down by shooting 2,025 triples.
But the Rockets are in another category as they are on pace to shoot what would be an NBA record 3,272 threes while running up nearly 101 possessions a game, which is just fourth in the league as more and more teams have embraced an up-tempo approach.
“I really don’t know what the ceiling is,” said Casey.
No one does, but teams aren’t going to be taking less threes any time soon.
The D’Antoni effect has had all kinds of ripples. This season is shaping up as one for the ages in the NBA, with all kinds of individual statistical thresholds being challenged. Harden came into Sunday’s game averaging 27.9 points, 11.9 assists and 8.2 rebounds a game. The last player to match or top those marks for a full season was Oscar Robertson in 1964-65.
Amazing, right? Except that Russell Westbrook of OKC is doing it this year too, while striving to become the first player since Robertson in ’61-62 to average a triple-double for an entire season. The Pelicans’ Anthony Davis, the Cavs’ LeBron James, Kevin Durant with the Warriors and Giannis Antetokounmpo with the Milwaukee Bucks are all putting together stat lines that would put them on some NBA shortlist or another.
More teams playing a wide-open style and putting the ball in their best players’ hands means more chances for good things to happen.
It’s happening in Toronto also. Kyle Lowry is working his way into the fringes of the NBA conversation by gunning a career-high 43.8 per cent from three on a career-high 7.6 attempts per game – the first time in his he’s on pace to shoot more threes than twos in a season.
DeRozan is bit of a throwback in that his career-best 27.6 points a game is coming with minimal three-point shooting – he’s made just 13 in the first 37 games – but he benefits from the space that the Raptors collection of three-point shooters require defences to give up.
But even as the tired Raptors tried to keep pace with the Rockets on Sunday night, the math was hard to overcome. DeRozan was his usual hardy self, contributing 15 of his Raptors-high 36 points in the fourth quarter. But when Toronto was making twos the Rockets were making threes, or at least slashing to the basket for layups in lanes opened by their three-point shooting.
Ever so slowly the Rockets left the Raptors behind; another argument for the NBA’s future.