Mike D'Antoni is spending Hall of Fame week talking about the offense that everybody laughed at and then everybody copied, and the honest version of that story is that he lost the series and won the sport.
Start in Phoenix, because everything starts in Phoenix. The seven seconds or less Suns took the ball out of the net and went, no set, no walk-up, no ceremony. Steve Nash won back to back MVPs running it. The 2004-05 team won 62 games and led the league in scoring, and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that it was a fun act that would get bullied out of the playoffs by somebody bigger. That group never got its ring. It got something stranger and more permanent: every team in the league eventually decided he was right. Watch a random possession today and you're watching D'Antoni's homework.
Then the Garden, which is where the legend gets weird. Linsanity was not a plan. It was a coach with an injured roster handing the keys to a guy who had been cut twice, and then watching Jeremy Lin turn February 2012 into the loudest three weeks that building had in years. Checked the almanac: February 10, 2012, Lin dropped 38 on Kobe and the Lakers at Madison Square Garden. Lightning in a bottle, sure. But somebody has to be willing to uncork the bottle.
The Lakers chapter he calls doomed, and he isn't wrong. He inherited a roster built for a different century, aging and mismatched, and then Kobe's Achilles went in April 2013 and took whatever was left of the plan with it. Some jobs are lost before the first practice. That one was.
What's next for him is the part I like. He is a coach whose ideas outlived his tenures everywhere he went, and the enshrinement is really the league admitting out loud what it has been quietly doing on every possession for fifteen years. Pace, spacing, freedom, trust the shooter. The trophy case never caught up to the influence. The plaque finally does.
I'll be watching how much of the speech is about Nash. My guess is most of it.
