Thank Mike D’Antoni, the “riverboat gambler”
After D’Antoni rolled the dice with David Lee, big men have never been the same
BY BRETT KOREMENOS

In Game 1 of the NBA Finals, the Denver Nuggets have a 16-point lead over the visiting Miami Heat early in the third quarter. Heat guard Gabe Vincent slows to a casual pace as he approaches the 3-point line with a live dribble. The Heat sorely need a bucket.
Vincent picks up his dribble and swings a pass to center Bam Adebayo, who’s just ambled past half-court to settle in at the top of the key. As Adebayo secures the pass and surveys the floor, teammate Max Strus sneakily vacates the left corner and positions himself behind Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon, who is defending Heat star forward Jimmy Butler. Strus sets a back screen for Butler, who cuts behind him into the lane. From his perch, Adebayo threads a low bounce pass perfectly into Butler for the easy dunk with 15 seconds left on the shot clock.
In Game 5, Nikola Jokić and his Nuggets are back in Denver trying to throw their best knockout punch. After Adebayo misses a soft hook in the paint, Jokić snares a rebound and heads up the floor. He dishes to Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who crosses half-court and then dishes to Jokić at the top of the key.
The Nuggets move in concert on the right side: Michael Porter Jr. sells a fake back-screen for Caldwell-Pope, then darts across the paint. With Jamal Murray and Jeff Green pulling Heat help defenders away from the paint on the left, Porter Jr. slides into an empty second box with Heat big man Kevin Love scrambling behind him. Jokić floats a pass over Adebayo to hit Porter Jr. in stride, and the forward hits a feathery floater with 14 seconds left in the possession.
These Finals pitted two of the league’s elite, playmaking big men against each other. Adebayo and Jokić might not be the first pair of slick-passing centers to square off for a title, but the way they orchestrated their respective offenses was a far cry from where the NBA was at the turn of the century.
Before Mike D’Antoni got to Phoenix, the center position in the NBA had been fairly binary—you either had a big man who operated in the post or one who defended him. The famed architect of the “:07 Seconds or Less” Suns offense had great success using Amar’e Stoudamire as the first rim-rocking, post-eschewing roll man.
The league has changed in all kinds of ways since then; one of those changes is that the NBA has become an almost impossible place for lumbering, low-skill big men. And D’Antoni did instigate that change. But, because there aren’t a lot of Amar’es in the world, arguably the more substantive D’Antoni innovation came without a lot of fanfare on a mediocre Knicks team.
As the 2007-2008 regular season concluded, the New York Knicks were basketball’s least watchable team. Head coach Isiah Thomas had squeezed just 23 wins from a squad that featured a soon-to-be-waived Stephon Marbury alongside veterans Jamal Crawford and Zach Randolph. The Big Apple needed big changes. Then-team president Donnie Walsh fired Thomas, then shipped Crawford and Randolph to clear cap space shortly after hiring D’Antoni, who started implementing what he’d done so well with the Suns: using pace and pick-and-rolls.
Though the revolution, to the chagrin of Knicks fans, didn’t immediately reverse the team’s fortunes, it did offer up playing time to the last pick of the first round in the 2005 draft, David Lee, who hadn’t played much to that point. Lee had the rugged reliability of your typical late-1990s, early-2000s power forward. He averaged a double-double in his second season, but didn’t set the league on fire.
Of course, that didn’t stop D’Antoni from slotting Lee as the Knicks’ starting center, leading to a significant jump in the big man’s stat line—from 10.8 points and 8.7 rebounds per game to 16.0 and 11.7, respectively. D’Antoni’s plan seemed to be to turn Lee into the Eastern Conference, ground-bound version of Stoudamire. But D’Antoni wasn’t done yet: Lee, his brawny power forward-turned-center, was about to become one of the Knicks’ primary ball-handlers.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to TrueHoop to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.