In hindsight, Mike D’Antoni and the “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns helped revolutionize the NBA. The high-octane offense he engineered in Phoenix during his tenure in many ways anticipated the way everyone around the league wants to play today, with an emphasis on spacing, ball movement, and three-point shooting, the latter a previously untapped resource that, when refined, has become the primary fuel source for modern basketball.
Those Suns squads of the mid-2000s contained the full DNA blueprint for their philosophical offspring in teams like the Warriors and Rockets, who under D’Antoni’s current stewardship (along with analytics wonk Daryl Morey in the front office) lead the charge in a quest to produce a brand of basketball that maximizes the value and efficiency of the long ball.
Having a future Hall of Famer like Steve Nash was an integral part of the equation for D’Antoni’s beta tests in Phoenix, and given the way the game has evolved in the intervening years, the current Rockets’ coach only wishes he would’ve emboldened Nash to unleash his shooting powers on their opponents every night.
Here’s what Marc Stein of the New York Times had to say about D’Antoni’s regrets as we approach Nash’s enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.
When it comes to Nash, I can’t put it better than Mike D’Antoni, who says if he knew then what he knows now, Seven Seconds Or Less would have been “eight 3s or more” for the point guard every night … pic.twitter.com/9uVJZCwd2W
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) September 4, 2018
Many consider Nash one of the greatest shooters in league history, though he’s often omitted from that discussion for precisely the reason that he simply didn’t take that many three-pointers. Nash shot 42.8 percent from downtown for his career but only attempted a little more than three per game. At his peak, Nash attempted 4.7 triples a night on 47 percent shooting from deep in 2007-08 — while it stands to reason that his efficiency might have tapered off a little if he shot more, just imagine how green his light would have been a decade later if he was connecting from deep that frequently on a nightly basis.
It’s a fascinating what-if, but ultimately we’ll have to settle for how it all played out in reality. For Nash, that means a stellar career that is nonetheless worthy of his Hall of Fame enshrinement, which the basketball world will celebrate when he joins fellow inductees Jason Kidd and Grant Hill at the annual ceremony in Springfield on Friday night.
