In his interview with TrueHoop this week, Mike D’Antoni lamented that he didn’t have adequate analytics during the “7 Seconds or Less” era in the early 2000’s when he and Steve Nash revolutionized the game.
“I’ve told Steve a thousand times—we didn’t go far enough with our approach because we didn’t have analytics,” D’Antoni told Tom Haberstroh. “Everybody was killing us about how we were playing. Too many threes, they said. Live by the 3, die by the 3, blah blah blah. If I hear that one more time, I’m going to throw up.”
The Suns success, of course, took place during the infancy of analytics as a tool for coaches, GMs and players.