Michael Andrew D’Antoni is an American professional basketball coach and former player. He is the assistant coach for the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association. While head coach of the Phoenix Suns, he won NBA Coach of the Year honors for the 2004–05 NBA season after the Suns posted 33 more wins than the previous season. He coached the New York Knicks starting in 2008 before resigning in 2012. He was hired by the Los Angeles Lakers seven games into the 2012–13 season. On June 1, 2016, D’ Antoni was named headCoach of the Rockets, and he received his second NBA Coach Of The Year award for the 2016–17 season.
About Mike D’Antoni in brief
Michael Andrew D’Antoni is an American professional basketball coach and former player. He is the assistant coach for the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association. While head coach of the Phoenix Suns, he won NBA Coach of the Year honors for the 2004–05 NBA season after the Suns posted 33 more wins than the previous season. He coached the New York Knicks starting in 2008 before resigning in 2012. He was hired by the Los Angeles Lakers seven games into the 2012–13 season. On June 1, 2016, D’ Antoni was named headCoach of the Rockets, and he received his second NBA Coach Of The Year award for the 2016–17 season. D’antoni holds American and Italian dual citizenship, and is known for favoring a fast-paced, offense-oriented system. He played college basketball at Marshall University, with the Thundering Herd, from 1970 to 1973. He also played for the Spirits of St. Louis of the American Basketball Association in 1975–76, and for the San Antonio Spurs in 1976–77. In 1990, he was voted the Italian LBA league’s top point guard of all time in 1990, and paced his team to five Italian League titles, two FIBA European Champions Cup titles, and two Italian Cups. In 2015, Olimpia Milano retired his No. 8 jersey, in order to honor him. Being of Italian origin, D’Antoni was also selected to play on the senior men’s Italian national team for the EuroBasket tournament in 1989.
His first NBA coaching job was with the Denver Nuggets in 1997–98 as the club’s director of player personnel. In 2001, he returned to Italy for a second stint, as the coach of Benetton Treviso. In 2002, he made his return to the NBA as a Phoenix Suns assistant under Frank Johnson. He replaced Johnson with 61 games left in the Suns’ failure to improve in the second half of the season, and received a vote of confidence from the team’s players. With the acquisition of Steve Nash before the 2004 season, he began an incredible turnaround for the team. He led the Suns to 62–20 to finish the first season in the regular season in first place in the NBA. His pick-and-gun offense was dubbed \”Seven Seconds or Less\”, a name that was a name of a book that was published in that year. In 2003, he replaced Frank Johnson as the Suns head coach. He then led the team to a 62-20 win-loss record, and the team went to the playoffs the following season. In 2008, he led the Knicks to a 28–8 regular season record in the Italian League, an Italian League championship, and to a 2002 Euroleague Final Four appearance, and won the Italian national domestic league title in the 1996–97 season. The next year, he became the Nuggets’ head coach, but was fired after a poor performance during the lockout-shortened 1998–99 season. His last NBA job was as the Portland Trail Blazers in 2000–01.
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