“Five hours of freakin’ misery awaits,” said D’Antoni as he boarded the plane. Then he and his assistants fired up their portable DVDs and watched the game, over and over and over, consigning themselves to their own personal small-screen hell.
Yet, no Suns coach—no coach I’ve ever known, in fact—wants to give up the life. The highs are too high. Though I never in any way, shape, or form considered myself a member of the team, I understood that feeling for the first time.
For at least seven months a year, NBA coaches spend as much as eighteen hours a day together. And the goal is to spend more—by advancing to the Western Conference finals, the Suns’ coaches were together almost constantly from the second week of September until the first week of June. Part of the reason I was accepted into their fraternity, I theorize, was that I supplied relief, a diversion from the never-ending mission of figuring it out, a buffer when they got sick of each other.
They have no secrets. If one assistant dozes off on a plane or in the coaches’ office, one of the others will pull out a cell phone and snap an unflattering photo of him. They rag each other endlessly about their packing “systems” on road trips and celebrate wildly when one or the other of them forgets socks or brings two different shoes. They shower and dress in locker rooms where space is at a premium and personal fashion peccadilloes become conversational fodder. Weber, for example, tucks his shirt into his undershorts, “a tip I picked up in GQ,” he says. “Maybe it works in the magazine,” says Dan D’Antoni, “but not in real life.”
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: “D’Antoni” alone will refer to Mike D’Antoni.)
One day Weber and Dan told me how much pleasure they get out of watching Alvin Gentry take his morning vitamins because it is so difficult for him. I wanted to see it, so we spent fifteen minutes surreptitiously tailing Gentry around the training room as he juggled the pills in his hand and made the conversational rounds. Finally, he grimaced, put a pill on his tongue, took a long slug of water, and violently tilted his head back to get it down. We burst into laughter.
“Let me guess,” he said, “you jackasses have been following me.”
Studying a coaching staff would be rich material for an industrial psychologist. A delicate political game is played every day, even on staffs as close-knit as the Suns’. Coaches are by nature intensely competitive, their lives defined by the joy of winning and the agony of that alternative eventuality. But they have to find a way to get along, to consider each other’s opinions yet make themselves heard in the eternal battle to gain traction within the organization. “There is an almost subconscious vying for attention,” concedes Iavaroni. “You want to feel indispensable, you want your credit. But you have to subjugate that for the good of the team.”
There is a distinct separation between the head coach and his assistants. Every day it is the head coach who must deal with the owner, the front office, the media, and the cold arithmetic of wins and losses. To the public, the most important person in the franchise is the star player; within the franchise, the most important person is the head coach. It’s not even close. “You slide down two feet on that bench,” says Gentry, who was once a head coach, “and you just feel the difference in pressure.”
A head coach has to act like the boss, even a head coach with the easygoing and casual personality of D’Antoni. It might seem like a small matter, but in seven months with the team I never saw D’Antoni, who is still in good shape, take a shot at the basket or do anything remotely connected to playing. Never. Before and after practice, I frequently shot around with the other assistants (I finished the season with a humiliating 3-13 H-O-R-S-E record against Iavaroni) and watched as they traded shots with and even got into some one-on-one work with the players. But D’Antoni was always the overseer. “Well, hell, why would I want to embarrass myself in front of guys who are the best players in the world?” he said when I asked him about it. My theory, though, is that he held off because, in some small way, it sets him apart. This is my gym, my practice, my team.
The theoretical role of the assistant is to give the head man enough information so that he can make his decisions, find his “comfort level,” as Weber puts it. But an assistant has to sense when the head man has enough information and doesn’t want to hear anything else. “I want every one of my coaches to say whatever the hell they want to say,” says D’Antoni. “I want to hear everything. But if I don’t follow what they say, I don’t want to hear about it afterward.” He rarely did. The Suns coaches move forward.
“Having been a head coach and an assistant,” says Gentry, “I’ve seen it from both sides. It’s tempting to just throw out suggestions aimlessly when something goes wrong. ‘Hey, let’s go trap this pick-and-roll.’ But if you trap it and they throw it to somebody else and he hits a three, the assistant is not the one who has to explain it. That’s on the head coach. That’s why you just have to shut the hell up sometimes.”
Countless teams have been ripped apart by assistants who curry favor with the star players or the general manager. “Getting your guy fired by backstabbing him,” says Iavaroni, “is the most common way to get a head job.” Over an entire season, I never saw one instance of that in Phoenix. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or won’t happen, particularly if the team starts to lose. But I didn’t see it. There were countless times when I was certain that one or a couple of the assistant coaches weren’t in complete accord with D’Antoni’s game-plan decision. But they never gave off a whiff of their doubt to the team. “Doug Collins used to have a saying when we were in Detroit,” says Gentry. “ ‘Agree or disagree in the room, but, when the meeting’s over, align.’ We always align.”
It was fascinating to watch the interaction of the coaches with each other and with D’Antoni, and he with them. Weber, for example, is below both Iavaroni (the designated lead assistant) and Gentry (the former head coach) on D’Antoni’s pecking order, yet he is the assistant most likely to chat up D’Antoni immediately after a time-out is called. It’s just Weber’s personality. (“White Noise,” Gentry calls him.) Iavaroni was schooled in a more formal process in Miami under Pat Riley. “I would never go right to Pat and say, ‘Coach, I think we need to do this.’ I would make a case with Stan Van Gundy [Riley’s lead assistant]. And if Stan thought it was valid, then he would take it to Pat.”
Iavaroni knows that D’Antoni doesn’t share his insatiable appetite for video, so he reflexively semi-apologizes for it in advance. “I have a lot of clips here, Mike, so any time you want to stop me…” The assistants respect each other’s territory. During a plane ride between Toronto and Detroit on April 1, Gentry, watching the replay of a game, catches Phoenix’s quicksilver guard Leandro Barbosa jumping around on defense when he should just be guarding his man. He tells Dan D’Antoni about it, so that Dan, who had become more or less Barbosa’s personal coach, could go back and discuss it with the player. Iavaroni, the de facto defensive coach, feels free to discuss that aspect of the game with any player. But if he happened to catch, say, a flaw in Boris Diaw’s shooting, he would tell Weber about it, and Weber, Diaw’s shooting coach, would be the one to bring it up.
If any of the assistants detected what they considered to be a major problem with the offense, they would certainly tell D’Antoni about it first, particularly if it involved Nash. Nash and D’Antoni are like quarterback and offensive coordinator. But D’Antoni respected the relationships—Iavaroni and the big men, Weber and Diaw, Dan and Barbosa—the assistants had with individual players, too. And D’Antoni would often count on Gentry, who has the gift for getting along with everyone, to talk to Marion or encourage one of the reserves who hadn’t played much.
Part of my motivation for doing the original SI story was to demonstrate that NBA coaches do, in fact, coach. While football coaches are venerated for both their acumen and their organizational skills, and baseball managers are cast as mystics, able to turn around the course of a season simply by calling a pitchout, pro basketball coaches are victims of the w
orst kind of stereotyping. The average sports fan, even some NBA fans, believe that coaches roll out the balls, players pick them up and start firing, and that pretty much constitutes the essence of what the coach does, until one day he gets fired with a year or two still left on his contract. (Or, in the case of Larry Brown, four years with $40 million left.) To watch D’Antoni and his assistants disprove the flawed conventional thinking was a unique privilege.
Some readers may object to the occasional rough language, but this is what sports sounds like. There are faculty meetings, Boy Scout getaways, and, Lord knows, sportswriter bull sessions at which the language is ten times rougher than at a meeting of the Suns coaches or a locker room conversation among players. And if I had been looking to write about indecorous behavior on the road, I chose the wrong team, certainly the wrong coaching staff. Unless you call ordering both onion rings and French fries at Johnny Rocket’s perverse—and you might—this was a strictly PG season.
Writing in the first person is an implicit act of narcissism, particularly when you are not the focus of the story. But the “I” voice does slip in once in a while and my only excuse is that it was unavoidable. Over time the book became an intensely personal experience, much more so than anything I’ve ever worked on. I witnessed more than half of the regular-season games and all except one of the playoff games live. That meant I spent quite a lot of time in “America’s Sweatiest City,” as Phoenix was declared by a publication called LiveScience, although from November to April it felt pretty damn good. I went on a dozen road trips and ate countless meals with the coaches. Night life was at a minimum, but Dan D’Antoni and I would share an adult beverage from time to time and solve most of the world’s problems. When I wasn’t with the team, I followed the Suns through the NBA-TV package, the Internet, and once, while en route to a New Year’s Eve party, on satellite radio.
Around the league, I had to accept the joshing I got about my affiliation. P. J. Carlesimo, the San Antonio Spurs’ assistant coach, saw me once and said, “Hey, there’s the Suns’ houseboy.” I had no retort.
Family and friends eventually got a case of Suns stroke, too. Chris Stone, my editor at SI, had a lot of general NBA business to talk over with me but our conversations invariably began with Phoenix. “You pick up anything about their offense this week?” Chris might ask. Or, “Did Eddie House say anything funny?” My brother-in-law’s wedding took place on the night of Game 7 of the playoff series against the Lakers, and I felt terrible about missing it. But when I reached the bride and groom by telephone to congratulate them, their first words were, “We saw the last part of the game in the bar at the reception. Awesome!” They may have had a glass of champagne or two by then.
Most emotionally invested was my wife, Donna, who in thirty years of marriage had never made a single comment about a player or game. One December morning when I was out in Phoenix, I awakened to find this e-mail message from her: “I think that Diaw’s really going to be a player!” That’s when I knew this was something different.
It was a fortuitous bonus that the season turned out infinitely more interesting than I thought it would. The postseason was so long and intriguing that the backbone of the book consists of those final six weeks of the season. And so we begin at the end.
—Jack McCallum
August 2006
Stone Harbor, N.J.
Prologue
Phoenix, June 3, 2006……………
GAME 6, WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS DALLAS 102, PHOENIX 93
It wasn’t until the end—the very end—that Steve Nash truly failed. Through seventy-nine regular-season games (he missed three with injuries) and three enervating playoff series, twenty games, Nash had not always played superbly, but he had always played nobly, attempting to fulfill the myriad responsibilities he had as the Phoenix Suns’ point guard and cocaptain. But now, when it was time for him to respond to a question from coach Mike D’Antoni…
Steve? You got anything?
The question hung in the air in a hushed Suns locker room in US Airways Center. Shawn Marion, the Suns’ other cocaptain, a reluctant talker even in the best of times, had already offered a couple of the requisite banalities. It was a great season. It was great playing with all you guys. Let’s come back strong. Platitudes, really, but nobody expected anything else. Platitudes are the lingua franca of sports, and, anyway, this was the time for platitudes. D’Antoni himself and Suns’ owner Robert Sarver, two men accustomed to holding a stage, had already addressed the group and nothing they had said would ever find its way to Bartlett’s.
D’Antoni: “All right, guys, unbelievable job. You guys gave everything you had and you should be proud.”
Sarver: “I’m really proud of you guys, given the setbacks we had this year. You guys brought it every night and you won your division, fifty-four games, took it all the way to here. But we’re gonna be even better next year, come back hard, and you guys did a great job and thank you very much.”
Actually, neither D’Antoni nor Sarver thought for a minute that everyone had given everything they had. But the Suns, collectively, achieved much more than anyone thought they would and, over the last eight weeks, had done it so dramatically. The Suns had finished the season with one word attached to them: resilient. So the message delivered by coach and owner, really, was the only one that made sense.
Steve? You got anything?
How many times during this eventful season—which included injuries, overtime nightmares, a fracture between ownership and front office, battles with referees, a couple of postseason miracles—had Nash dribbled himself into exhaustion, as he had in the dying moments of this season-ending loss to the Mavericks? How many times had he stood in the Suns’ locker room, either before a game or at halftime, urging his teammates to get out early and warm up, preparation being one of the principal reasons for his unlikely rise to the top? How many times had he envisioned his Suns beating the Mavericks (the team that two summers ago had let him walk into free agency and into the eager arms of the Suns), the kind of sublime vengeance only a competitive athlete could understand?
Steve? You got anything?
How many times had Nash conversed with either D’Antoni or one of the Suns’ other four assistant coaches about strategy, most of those talks predicated toward tweaking an offense that, over the past two seasons, had revolutionized the NBA, even as it left the franchise one agonizing step from a shot at a championship? How many practice jumpers had he launched, trying always to further refine a sweet stroke that was partly responsible for his rise to preeminence among the NBA’s point guards?
Steve? You got anything?
For Nash, the season had been bittersweet, as every season is for players with unquenchable ambition and unrealized championship hopes. More sweet than bitter, to be sure. But frustration, doubt, and failure had been dogged companions from October to June, particularly for one so competitive as Nash. Win a second straight Most Valuable Player award…but deal with the doubters who say it should’ve gone to LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, or Dwyane Wade, players with more spectacular athleticism, as well as the whispers that his skin color (white) had something to do with the honor. Play well…but play always in pain, too—a congenitally creaky back, tight hamstrings, sore knees, wobbly ankles. Achieve so much as a team without an injured Amare’ Stoudemire, an integral part of last year’s team…but worry that Stoudemire’s return next season will upset the delicate chemistry that had been built with new additions such as free-agent shooting guard Raja Bell and multipositioned Atlanta Hawks castoff Boris Diaw, benign additions to the locker room. Be happy for good pal and former Dallas teammate Dirk Nowitzki, whose outside shooting had helped throttle the Suns, and who was going to represent the West in the Finals…but be sad that Nowitzki, with whom he had twice broken bread during this Western Conference playoff, had beaten him to the big stage.
Steve? You got anything?
Since Nash arrived in Phoenix (the team that had originally drafted him in 199
6 and for which he had played the first two seasons of his career before being traded to Dallas) in the summer of 2004, appearing at his introductory press conference in a pair of golf shoes (the only hard-soled kicks in his closet), he had become the face of the franchise, a face so popular that assistant coach Alvin Gentry once opened a box addressed to him to find a short note, a basketball, and an instant camera. “Could you please get Steve Nash to sign my ball and take a picture of him doing it?” was the plea.
There is not a face like it in all of American pro sports. Nash more closely resembles street urchin than street baller, hollow eyes, long nose, long, straight hair that he brushes away from his eyes and hooks behind his ears, sometimes in mid-play. Nash reads books, dabbles in lefty politics, has a BOYCOTT VEAL sticker plastered to his SUV, and tosses out a little Zen from time to time. “I don’t like to build maps,” he told me one day at practice after I had asked him if he has a favorite spot on the floor to shoot from. He’s Canadian, too, giving him automatic legitimacy as a peace-loving anticapitalist. And so a certain counterculture ethos had settled in around Nash, and, by extension, the Suns.
But the idea of Nash as a symbol of something—the Indie Point Guard, the First Counterculture MVP—in fact obscures the central truth about him: He is first and foremost a gym rat. He doesn’t fit in basketball around reading Karl Marx; he reads a little Marx and shoots a million jump shots. Only such a player could lead the D’Antoni revolution.
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