Mike D’Antoni will serve as an assistant to new Brooklyn Nets head coach Steve Nash, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. D’Antoni famously coached Nash on the Phoenix Suns in the mid-2000s.
With Nash as his superstar point guard, D’Antoni popularized the seven-seconds-or-less offense that made the Suns a title contender and served as a precursor to the NBA’s pace-and-space era that followed. In their four seasons together in Phoenix, they won better than 70 percent of their games and reached the 2005 and 2006 Western Conference finals, when Nash won his back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards.