By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)
This offseason has been quite the coaching carousel in the NBA with 11 teams designating new permanent head coaches. Thursday afternoon, the music stopped and the carousel came to a halt as the final vacancy was filled in Houston, leaving a seat vacant on the Philadelphia 76ers bench.
Here’s the details from Woj at the Vertical:
“The Houston Rockets are finalizing a four-year, $16 million-plus deal to hire Mike D’Antoni as head coach, league sources told The Vertical. The Rockets will hold a team option on the fourth year of the deal, sources said.”
For a couple weeks now, Mike D’Antoni has been viewed as the frontrunner for the Rockets job, but Houston owner Leslie Alexander wanted to take a more active role in selecting the next head coach and interviewed a large number of candidates before finally tapping D’Antoni. After the “exhaustive” search process prior to Bryan Colangelo’s hiring, I can appreciate an organization doing a fair bit of thorough due diligence.
D’Antoni’s move to Houston is certainly good news for Brett Brown. As has been discussed ad nauseam, although Bryan Colangelo has publicly maintained Brown is the coach for the foreseeable future, people felt he would be more comfortable with D’Antoni leading the team based upon their relationship in Phoenix. Following the PR move in sending Brown to the NBA draft lottery, D’Antoni’s move is the final block in cementing Brown’s job security.
Still, it’s not the ideal bit of news for the team itself, as it would have been interesting to see what an innovative offensive mind like D’Antoni could have done with a unique talent like Ben Simmons or a versatile big man like Joel Embiid (required “if healthy” qualifier here). We’ll have to settle for watching whether James Harden can break the points record in what should be a hyper, all-offense, no-defense system in Houston. Until then, we’ll await word on fills D’Antoni’s shoes on the Philadelphia bench.
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