Millions of Americans start the day by consuming a cup of coffee. Whether it’s a mug they brew in the comfort of their home or something that they pick up on their way to class/the office/wherever they need to go, having a cup of coffee is an important aspect of many morning routines.
You can count Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni among those who have to grab something to drink before they get their day going. And like many, D’Antoni has a go-to order: Starbucks’ sugar-free vanilla latte, size Venti.
Jake Fischer of Sports Illustrated wrote about this strange addiction. It is strange because, as it turns out, D’Antoni isn’t actually a coffee fan. But he loves Starbucks so much that if he doesn’t get his hands on a cup of the warm stuff, he gets put into an awful mood.
He orders a Venti, sugar-free, vanilla latte, per usual, seamlessly scanning the loyalty rewards app on his phone. “I don’t actually like coffee,” Mike D’Antoni swears. “But I’m addicted to Starbucks.”
“Oh, it’s everyday,” says Hornets head coach Steve Clifford, a Lakers assistant under D’Antoni during the 2012-13 season. “I don’t care home, road, no matter practice or game, if you went into his hotel room—whatever it was—he’s gonna find a Starbucks.” “If he can’t get there, I don’t want to talk to him the rest of the day,” says Dan D’Antoni, the younger brother of the Rockets’ head coach.
I take my coffee black, so I have no idea if D’Antoni’s order is good or not.
But hey, whatever, drink what you want to drink as long as it makes you happy. D’Antoni said that he likes this particular drink from Starbucks because it reminds him of his days in Italy — he tried cappuccino when he was abroad, loved it, and ever since then he’s become addicted to sweetened coffee drinks.
Then again, dropping this much coin on a drink from Starbucks might not be the best idea. We tried to do the math on how much money D’Antoni has spent since he first became a coach in the NBA, as he mentioned he has a latte a day and two on days where his team has a game.
We’re going to make a few assumptions here, based on the fact that D’Antoni has been in the United States for 19 of the last 20 years — he went to coach in Italy for the 2001-02 season, so we’re going to take that out, because as Fischer writes, D’Antoni used to crush four cappuccinos a day, and we just don’t know how that routine would have gone down if he went back.
So yes, here are our assumptions:
- Mike D’Antoni has consumed one latte a day, every day, for the last 20 years. On gamedays, that jumps to two cups of latte.
- The price of lattes are uniform from one place to another — except for Utah, we’ll touch on this in a bit — and adjusted for inflation. Again, we’ll touch on this in a bit.
- During D’Antoni’s time away from the NBA, so 2000-01 and 2014-15 prior to his stint as an assistant coach with the Sixers, he was having one coffee a day.
- Summer League games are not counted, preseason and postseason are. We’re also not going to count USA Basketball games since there was nothing in there about whether he would get Starbucks while abroad or if he’d find a cappuccino place. Those will just act as one day in the grand scheme of things.
To handle the matter of price, we consulted a number of different sources — here are what we believe to be its current prices, the 1997 Starbucks annual report, and this article about raising prices. In the end, we decided to set the price at $4.10 per drink after taking the old prices that popped up and averaging them out.
Now, for the games. Here is how many regular season games Mike D’Antoni has coached with each NBA team he has been on the bench for.
NUGGETS
97-99 (50 games as HC, 82 as director of player personnel)
SUNS
02-08 (389 games)
KNICKS
08-12 (288 games)
LAKERS
12-14 (154 games)
SIXERS
15-16 (54 games)
ROCKETS
16-Now (94 games)
In all, that is 1,111 regular season games as a head or assistant (in some capacity) coach. He’s also coached in 70 postseason games, so let’s bump that number up to 1,181.
Preseason games are far trickier. I could not find the numbers for the Nuggets, but he did coach 46 preseason games for the Suns (hold this thought), 24 for the Knicks (this one too), eight for the Lakers, and 12 for the Rockets. In all, that is 90 career preseason games. For the sake of this post, we’re saying that Mike D’Antoni has coached in 1,271 basketball games, meaning he’s taken multiple trips to Starbucks 1,271 times.
The issues here are twofold: One is that the Knicks played a preseason game in Milan prior to the 2010-11 season. Obviously, he is not having Starbucks while he is there, and instead, he is crushing cappuccinos. The team went to Paris after and ended that preseason playing in Montreal, but for the sake of argument, we’ll keep those in (we just don’t know what his routine would have been those days) and take out the four days D’Antoni spent in Italy. That’s $20.50 we’re removing from the total for the four days and one gameday. He probably spends more than this on cappuccino places, but we’re just talking about trips to Starbucks.
We’re also taking out $4.10 for one preseason game the Suns played in Utah on Oct. 17, 2006. Why? Well, as D’Antoni told Sports Illustrated, “Utah’s one, it throws me for a loop. I’m serious. I dread going there. I like Utah, but they don’t have a Starbucks.” While Desert News Sports points out there are 10 Starbucks “within a reasonable distance” from where D’Antoni’s teams stay, it seems like he has issues with this.
So we’re just going to go back and remove every game D’Antoni has coached in Utah. That is 22 games — we won’t add in a day spent in Utah before or after a game since we just don’t know that — meaning we’re subtracting another $90.20.
This leads to the grand finale: 19 years of getting Starbucks every day, with 1,271 of those days featuring two trips (with some exceptions). Here is how the math breaks down.
- 365 days x 19 years = 6,935 days. [NOTE: we’re adding five days for leap years in this next step]
- 6,940 days x $4.10 for a latte = $28,454 spent on lattes
- 1,271 games x $4.10 for a latte = $5,211.10 spent on gameday lattes
- $28,454 + $5,211.10 = $33,665.10 spent on lattes from Starbucks over the last 20 years, unadjusted
- $33,665.10 — $114.80 for his Milan trip and trips to Utah = A grand total of $33,550.30
So we can say with some amount of certainty that D’Antoni, over the last 20 years of his life, has spent somewhere in the area of $33,550.30 on trips to Starbucks. If you want to be picky and say that there are still 51 days left in 2017 and chop an additional $209.10 off of that, go to town.
But yes, the larger point here is that Mike D’Antoni spends a whole heck of a lot of money on lattes from Starbucks. If anyone who works at Starbucks’ corporate headquarters is reading this, give the man a plaque somewhere.
