Philadelphia 76ers: Mike D’Antoni Intriguing As Potential Addition

Jerry Colangelo is moving quickly in his efforts to remake the Philadelphia 76ers, with a report that Mike D’Antoni could join the coaching staff.

The Philadelphia 76ers on Friday announced that head coach Brett Brown has had his contract extended through 2018-19 and now there are reports he might be getting some high-profile help on the bench.

According to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports, the 76ers are in talks with former NBA Coach of the Year Mike D’Antoni to assume the role of associate head coach under Brown.

That a coach received a contract extension after going 38-150 in two-plus seasons on the bench speaks to the job Brown has done under conditions as difficult as any NBA coach has ever faced.

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One could argue that he has overachieved to get those 38 victories. He had 23 different players suit up for at least one game during a 2013-14 campaign that ended with a 19-63 record.

Last season saw 25 players wear the red, white and blue during an 18-64 debacle and thus far this year, the 76ers have gone 1-22 with 14 players in the mix.

The extension would allay concerns that Brown would become a dead man walking while D’Antoni waited in the wings to assume the head coaching duties under Colangelo, a relationship that existed during part of D’Antoni’s most successful NBA coaching tenure with the Phoenix Suns in the early 21st century.

D’Antoni took the seven-seconds-or-less Suns to the Western Conference Finals twice in five seasons in Phoenix, from 2003, when he replaced Frank Johnson 21 games into the 2003-04 campaign, through 2008, when D’Antoni left Phoenix to take a higher-profile position with the New York Knicks.

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He was 253-136 in parts of five seasons in the Valley of the Sun after going 14-36 in his lone season as head coach of the Denver Nuggets during the lockout-shortened 1998-99 campaign.

After leaving Phoenix, he never found the same success.

The Knicks reached their high-water mark under D’Antoni when they were 42-40 in 2010-11. He was fired after an 18-24 start the following year.

That led him to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2012, where he was 40-32 after assuming the duties from interim coach Bernie Bickerstaff, a season when a reunion for former Suns point guard Steve Nash was derailed by injuries and the Dwight Howard–Pau Gasol pairing never quite worked.

D’Antoni has been out of the NBA since he resigned following a 27-55 season with the Lakers in 2013-14.

The Golden State Warriors’ title last season bore many of D’Antoni’s fingerprints, with former Suns general manager Steve Kerr coaching the team and former D’Antoni assistant Alvin Gentry playing a big role as Kerr’s right-hand man on the bench.

D’Antoni would bring needed experience to Brown’s coaching staff, which currently includes Lloyd Pierce, Billy Lange, Sean Rooks, Eugene Burroughs and Will Weaver—none of whom has spent more than four years as a full-time NBA assistant.

The 64-year-old D’Antoni wants to be a head coach in the NBA again and getting back on a staff would help his visibility, to be sure.

He hasn’t worked as assistant since he joined Johnson’s staff in Phoenix in 2002, however, and his resume also includes eight years as a head coach in Italy, where he also played for 13 years from 1977-90.

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D’Antoni first worked as an assistant—for the first time at any level—under Bill Hanzlik with the Nuggets in 1997-98 and spent the 2000-01 season as an assistant to Mike Dunleavy with the Portland Trail Blazers before going to the Suns.

While it’s true D’Antoni was at the vanguard of the NBA’s current small-ball craze, it is a style that didn’t fit well during his stops in New York and Los Angeles and seems ill-suited for a Philadelphia team that is severely lacking in NBA-caliber backcourt and wing players.

Indeed, general manager Sam Hinkie’s strategy for rebuilding the 76ers has focused almost exclusively on drafting or acquiring young bigs—Nerlens Noel, Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor and the rights to European Dario Saric—at the expense of any investment in guards.

Even Michael Carter-Williams’ Rookie of the Year campaign in 2013-14 was more a product of the player accumulating decent statistics—16.7 points, 6.3 assists, 6.2 rebounds and 1.9 steals per game—on a horrible team where he got to handle the ball almost exclusively.

Combine that with the fact the 2013 rookie class is looking as if it will turn out to be one of the worst of all-time and Carter-Williams’ continued struggles with the Milwaukee Bucks since being traded in February and that Rookie of the Year award doesn’t stand out as a gem on Hinkie’s rebuilding resume.

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But assuming Colangelo will do little, subtle things—like ensuring the team adds actual NBA players at more than one position—D’Antoni could be a key voice in developing a young group to compete in the smaller, faster NBA that he helped usher in.