HARSH REALITY OF COACHING

It’s hard to believe how fast Mike D’Antoni’s free fall from being an elite NBA coach to being a prime candidate in the chopping board this early in the season. The New York Knicks had only won once in eight games and everyone is pointing to D’Antoni as the main culprit for the woeful start.

It’s not too long ago when pundits kept on praising D’Antoni and the Phoenix Suns for it’s revolutionized run-and-gun game which resulted into four winning seasons out of five campaigns D’Antoni spent in the Desert City. He was well acknowledged as the man who turned around the career of Steve Nash with the Canadian extraordinary point guard bagging back-to-back Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards under his watch.

But there seems to be an extreme contrast during his days with the Suns before and the now, the Knicks. With Phoenix, he had a great team anchored on Nash, Amare Stoudemire, Shawn Marion, Boris Diaw and Leandro Barbosa. While with the Knicks, he had to settle for journeymen and mediocre players like Larry Hughes, Nate Robinson, Al Harrington, David Lee and Danilo Gallinari among others.

When D’Antoni bolted out of the Suns to join the Gotham City outfit, he was welcome and seen in the Apple City as “the savior” of the disgruntled franchise coming off from a erratic leadership courtesy of erstwhile mentor Isiah Thomas. But just like his predecessors in the Knicks camp which included the legendary Larry Brown, his initial year was a big bust finishing off with a disappointing 32-50 win-loss slate. And as expected, D’Antoni’s coaching style was widely-criticized by the media. He is now enduring heavy pressure from the Knicks management and fans to finally deliver in his second season and if not, it’s gonna be goodbye time in New York for the 2004-05 NBA coach of the year.

D'Antoni’s current situation just proves that coaching life in the NBA is a dog-eats-dog world and is far from being considered as a stable job. Today, you are praise in high heavens and tomorrow, you are a goner.