D’Antoni Out as Suns Head Coach

By: D.K. Wilson

Mike D’Antoni’s wide-open brand of basketball appears to be officially dead in Phoenix.

Just hours after losing 92-87 in Game 5 and four games to one ion the series to the San Antonio Spurs in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs Jack McCallum of Sports Illustrated reported that D’Antoni is out as the Suns head coach:

Mike D’Antoni, the NBA’s Coach of the Year for the 2004-05 season and the man credited with re-invigorating fast-break basketball in a league gone stale, will not be back to coach the Phoenix Suns for the 2008-09 season, SI.com has learned. D’Antoni deferred questions about his job status after the Suns were eliminated by the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of their Western Conference first-round playoff series on Wednesday night at the AT&T Center in Alamo City….

The Suns have long been one of the NBA’s model franchises, and both D’Antoni and Kerr, for whatever differences they might have about the direction of the team, are respected around the league. It’s hard to believe, then, that D’Antoni’s situation would devolve into an ugly, protracted war, New York Knicks style.

How exactly the scenario unfolds depends largely on whether or not D’Antoni gets another job offer. The most palatable scenario for all in Phoenix would be: Team A asks the Suns for permission to talk to D’Antoni, who has two years left on his contract; Suns say OK; D’Antoni interviews and is hired.

It is thought that D’Antoni could land in Chicago where Jim Boylan was fired after replacing now-Milwaukee Bucks head coach Scott Skiles. Another possible landing place for D’Antoni is Toronto where Sam Mitchell seems to be perennially treading on thin Canadian ice. If D’Antoni was to coach the Raptors he would be rejoined with Bryan Colangelo, his former boss in Phoenix.

McCallum seems to feel that the Bulls team has the right nucleus for D’Antoni’s open court style of play. However, Toronto has a bevy of foreign-born players on its roster, many of who grew up knowing of D’Antoni’s exploits as a player and a head coach in Europe. Andrea Bargnani, Maceo Baston, Primoz Brezec, Jose Calderon, Carlos Delfino, Jose Garbajosa, Rasho Nesterovic, and Anthony Parker all have international basketball experience and would be comfortable in D’Antoni’s system.

At the same time, the Bulls whose most experienced player is Larry Hughes (29, nine years in the NBA), is a very young team that would welcome a departure from anything that has to do with Skiles’ defense-first, defense-only mentality.

In his four seasons with Phoenix D’Antoni amassed an impressive 232-96 record. But despite having teams that were thought to be of championship caliber the Suns under D’Antoni have never advanced to the NBA Finals.

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D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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1 Comment

  1. http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3374706

    Kerr’s denying the report (no surprise). I think the most likely scenario is something the SI story touched on, the Suns will wait until another team offers him a contract so they don’t have to pay him the $8 million left on his contract. Not that the Suns have a history of being cheap…

    Comment by David on April 30, 2008

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