D’Antoni, Popovich and the ghosts of Spurs-Suns past
By John Wilmes
On Monday night, Mike D’Antoni was livid. It was the third quarter of the first game of the Western Conference Semifinals, and he was coaching on the road in San Antonio. This scene describes now as it describes then. The current Houston Rockets head coach, seemingly still bearing the weight of his famed “Seven Seconds Or Less” Phoenix Suns’ playoff losses to Gregg Popovich’s Spurs, was shaking his arms and screaming and calling a timeout when his Rockets had let their walloping lead slip to a mere 28 points.
In moments like these, it looks like D’Antoni is trying to do more than just win a series. It looks like he’s trying to correct history, particularly given MVP candidate James Harden’s recent Players Tribune article — in which the Rockets outsized point guard and 2016-17 league leader in assists per game provided a narrative explaining how his new coach inspired him to be more like Steve Nash. At a time when Popovich has taken his team back into a bigger, slower, more deliberate direction at odds with the trajectory of the NBA, D’Antoni’s Rockets are extending the evolution of the game set forth by his Suns squads. Houston pushed the pace as much as anyone this season, and soundly surpassed all other teams in 3-pointers taken, setting a league record.
Though D’Antoni is in Houston and sans mustache now, and though the time-proof Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili are the only recognizable players from the famed Suns-Spurs playoff matchup that took place exactly a decade ago, the philosophical friction between these two coaches remains. Like a summoning of ghosts of Western Conference past, the garbage time created by the Rockets’ emphatic blowout victory in Game 1 created the space for memories to emerge.
Conspicuous in the lopsided, post-explosion drift of this game was the emotional energy of the typically unflappable Spurs. Following a series of slight skirmishes, Spurs big man Dewayne Dedmon struck an intimidating pose in Harden’s face, earning an ejection in an ensuing tiff with Nene — who was also ejected. (Asked about the encounter after the game, Harden accused of Dedmon of “talking greasy.”)
In his boil-over, Dedmon became the first Spur to be ejected from a playoff game since Robert Horry was; against the Suns, ten years ago. Horry had hip-checked Steve Nash hard in the tense ending moments of Game 4 in San Antonio, inspiring the benches to clear in anger. The infamous fallout from this occasion got Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw suspended for the following game, due to a purely technical part of the rule book. The Spurs won the subsequent two games and the series, and those mythological, cult-inspiring, future-offensive blueprint-forging Suns and their followers never quite got over the loss. It felt, and still feels to many, like a cosmic injustice.
The available YouTube footage of that occasion is pretty blurry; the metaphysical beef, here, takes us back to a time when that technology was still finding its way to the mainstream. And D’Antoni, in the interim decade, has grown his grudge like the Count of Monte Cristo, toiling in NBA mediocrity with high-profile but low-success jobs with the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers, working in vain with broken cultures and players past their physical primes. This Rockets-Spurs series is the first time he’s sniffed the second round of the playoffs since 2007.
With Harden at the helm and a wildly complementary crew around him, assembled diligently by like-minded general manager Daryl Morey, D’Antoni appears incredibly ready, and massively stoked, to finally prove a stylistic point that escaped the audience ten years ago. Put simply: faster is better, smaller is better, nimbler is better.
If Game 1 is any indication, the proof is here.
The Spurs’ veteran big men David Lee, Pau Gasol, and LaMarcus Aldridge looked lost in time against Clint Capela, a willing instrument of D’Antoni and Harden’s pick-and-roll gusto if there ever was one, and against the deep shooting range of power forward Ryan Anderson. The Beard played San Antonio’s defense with ease, working a simple push-pull between finding his own shot or creating for others; either way, his gravity seemed unguardable. He finished with 20 points and 14 assists. The Rockets shot 22-of-50 from beyond the arc, while the Spurs came in at 9-of-29.
The Rockets’ series victory, if it is to occur, will not necessarily be the authentication of D’Antoni’s ethic, at least not what he might need in his soul, for him to get past what happened in 2007. The more overwhelming reality, which we saw when the Spurs fell to the younger Oklahoma City Thunder a year ago, is that, beyond Kawhi Leonard, San Antonio is old. And ultimately: not that talented. Popovich’s night-in, night-out stratagems mean more in the regular season than they do here.
Next: Parity, predictability, fate and playoff basketball
It appears, for now, that D’Antoni will get to hold that truth against him. And the validation of his imprint on the game has moved past him, anyway — have you seen the Golden State Warriors play, lately? Ghosts don’t follow logic, though, so even though D’Antoni may undo Popovich with a different, less satisfactory reality, let’s enjoy watching this man disentangle himself from his haunting.