UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Former Phoenix Suns coach Mike D’Antoni and his longtime big man with Phoenix and the New York Knicks, Amar’e Stoudemire, are two of the nine inductees entering the Naismith Hall of Fame this weekend in Springfield, Massachusetts.
But as Stoudemire and D’Antoni become forever enshrined in basketball history, it was their willingness to be different that helped them forge legendary careers. After years of coaching in the NBA and Italy, D’Antoni implemented the “7 seconds or less” offense once Steve Nash came back to Phoenix. The system is considered the catalyst for the fast, three-point-heavy offense that many NBA teams run today, and Stoudemire was the All-NBA big man who manned the paint for it.
Going 31-4 to start the 2004-05 season, winning 54 or more games in four straight seasons and making the Western Conference Finals in two straight seasons, Phoenix separated itself from the competition through its willingness to play unconventionally. The “7 seconds or less” offense was designed to give players ample opportunities to score and make plays, which is why D’Antoni thinks players bought in.
“We went where everybody can eat. Instead of that guy posting up this guy all the time, or going to a specific spot with the ball every time, we let everybody feed, and boy, they just bought in and went with it,” D’Antoni said. “It’s easy also to put the team first when your stats are strong because everybody wants to earn money, and you got to earn money by having stats in a career year.”
Someone eager to play in the new offense? Stoudemire. Despite being one of the youngest players on the team and going from playing power forward to center, he wanted to set the tone for his teammates by accepting the change without any qualms.
“I wanted to be a team player. Obviously, I had goals and wanted to be the best and dominate and show the world how good I am, but I also was willing to be a team player, and I think for me as a leader, you want your teammates to be leaders also,” Stoudemire said.
That leadership, he credits not just to D’Antoni but also to his “throwbacks,” as he called them: teammate Scott Williams, Suns broadcaster Eddie Johnson and team security guard Kevin Tucker. In his early days, when he was too young to go out to bars and clubs, he would hang around them because they provided him with “positive leadership,” which he feels put him on the right path. That leadership helped make the first year of “7 seconds or less” a memorable one during Stoudemire’s NBA tenure.
In the 2004-05 season, Stoudemire arguably had the best season of his career, making the All-Star team, averaging a career-high 26 points per game and receiving All-NBA Second Team honors while helping the Suns secure the best record in the NBA. Stoudemire, Nash, who won league MVP, and Shawn Marion were the first trio of teammates in NBA history at the time to earn All-NBA honors. Stoudemire and the team’s open-minded approach to D’Antoni’s new offense helped the system gel early and often. He says that everything came naturally in training camp.
“We all were in top shape, ready to go. And from training camp, we saw something special. We saw the style of play and the speed we were playing with,” Stoudemire said. “I was at my athleticism peak, and we had Shawn Marion, who was a brilliant floor runner and Swiss Army knife type of player, and Nash was the pass-first guy who could get the ball to whoever was hot.”
Along with Nash and this year’s two inductees, Grant Hill and Shaquille O’Neal were also members of the Suns during the 2000s who are in the Hall of Fame. D’Antoni coached only Hill, but Stoudemire played with both of them.
While they didn’t win a championship and break the franchise’s title drought, their impact on the game hasn’t been forgotten by people who covered the team, including Suns broadcaster Tom Leander.
Even once D’Antoni left the Suns to coach the Knicks, his impact on the organization remained strong. When Alvin Gentry took over as head coach in 2009 after the team fired Terry Porter, he tried to keep the offense the same.
“I just remember that when I took over, the one thing that I was gonna do was we were gonna go back to what I call ‘Phoenix Suns basketball,’ the ‘7 seconds or less’ days,” Gentry said.
Playing D’Antoni’s style of offense, the team scored 140 points in each of Gentry’s first three games as coach.
D’Antoni doesn’t give himself the credit other people do, but he feels the offense he ran in Phoenix was validated by how the Golden State Warriors have run their offense for so many years and won four championships.
“They’re playing the way that we played because we did it kind of without analytics, and we didn’t have that knowledge yet, and so now they do it with analytics telling them that’s the way to go, and so it’s obviously satisfying,” he said.
D’Antoni never won an NBA championship, but as the NBA becomes more and more three-point-centric (teams shot 13 more threes per game this year than they did 10 seasons ago) and with his teams consistently leading the league in three-point attempts throughout his career, his name will be one to remember when telling the story of the three-point revolution. Players like Stoudemire, who were willing to play a role in spacing the floor for their teammates, will be a part of it.
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