Phoenix Suns fans who witnessed the 7 Seconds Or Less revolution understand why Mike D’Antoni will officially enter the 2026 Naismith Hall of Fame class as a contributor this coming August.
But the butterfly effect of how D’Antoni landed in Phoenix is a story to tell before getting to how his approach blossomed into something that is now deemed Hall-worthy.
“It’s not just one aha moment that you do it,” D’Antoni told Arizona Sports’ Bickley & Marotta on Monday.
His first head-coaching job in 1990 with Italian club Olimpia Milano saw D’Antoni coach point guard Sasha Djordjevic, who later became a coach himself. The team also included young big man Antonio Davis, who would eventually stick in the NBA and play for the Pacers, Raptors, Bulls and Knicks.
“I had to change it up because a team wasn’t performing, and using my background as a player, I would kind of experiment with going small and had a great point guard and a great center that could roll,” D’Antoni said.
During that run with Olimpia Milano from 1990-94, another circumstance connected the head coach to former Suns owner Jerry Colangelo and general manager Bryan Colangelo, Jerry’s son.
“I knew nothing of (the Colangelo family) and didn’t know them, but Bryan marries a girl that had worked closely with my wife in Milan, for the team,” D’Antoni said. “Just the friendship that developed from that, and then … at Benetton (in 2001-02) I had three NBA-ready players in (Jorge) Garbajosa, (Bostjan) Nachbar and (Nikoloz) Tskitishvili. NBA teams are coming over … you strike up so many friendships.
“It just came to where Jerry and Bryan said, ‘Hey, let’s get you to Phoenix.'”
Those were the buds that eventually blossomed into the 2004-05 Suns, who changed the NBA with an undersized, fast-paced and 3-point-centric approach.
D’Antoni landed in Phoenix first as an assistant under Frank Johnson in 2003-04. And when Phoenix fired Johnson after an 8-13 start, D’Antoni took over as interim.
The Suns would only win 29 games that year as they traded guards Stephon Marbury and Penny Hardaway in a midseason selloff and later acquired then-rookie Joe Johnson at the deadline.
The offseason saw the team sign Steve Nash and Quentin Richardson to join a core of Johnson, Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire, and retaining D’Antoni heading into 2004-05 set the wheels in motion for a 62-win year.
With Nash as the engine in the first of his two Most Valuable Player seasons, Phoenix led the NBA in scoring, pace, 3-point makes and 3-point accuracy.
“That’s something that we both regret, I didn’t push him to (shoot more 3s),” D’Antoni said of Nash. “He was such a team player and whatever, he should have been a little bit more selfish because he was that good of a shooter. Those (thoughts) are retrospect. You’re right, we had some great teams.”
D’Antoni never got over the hump in Phoenix. The Suns fell to the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference Finals in 2005 after playing two games of the series without Johnson. They fell in the conference finals again the next season, then the conference semifinals in 2007 and first round in 2008.
Johnson’s injury and the infamous 2007 bench-clearing from Robert Horry’s hip-check of Nash, which led to the suspensions of Stoudemire and Boris Diaw, defined the oh-so-close moments for Phoenix.
“There are a lot of what-ifs … who knows?” D’Antoni said.
“Sometimes you don’t appreciate what you have and you don’t think it was something great, and we started trying to tinker with it because we couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that, we got to get over the hump,” the Hall of Fame-inductee added. “Maybe (in hindsight, the right thing to do was) just getting better as a team and hope for a few (breaks). Or don’t get any bad breaks.”
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