The Rockets aren’t the second coming of Mike D’Antoni’s Suns

Mike D’Antoni will hold a special place in the hearts of basketball fans who came of age just after the turn of the millennium. After Rick Adelman’s Kings and Don Nelson’s Mavericks put cracks in the old brutal ’90s paradigm, D’Antoni shattered it with the Suns. He embraced the three-pointer and pushed the bounds of tempo under his famous Seven Seconds Or Less offense. He found creative ways to use creative players and literally changed the fate of basketball.

D’Antoni always had trouble repeating that success, though. He cashed out with the Knicks, but didn’t have a suitable roster until the end of his tenure. He tried again with the Lakers, but got short-circuited by injuries and age.

Now he’s in Houston and appears to have a winning team again. More importantly, the gaudy offensive numbers and idiosyncratic playing style has viewers wondering: Is this the rebirth of Seven Seconds Or Less?

Sort of.

This has been deemed the marriage of D’Antoni’s style with GM Daryl Morey’s preferences. A reliance on deep shooting is indeed a facet of Moreyball, but it’s also always been part of D’Antoni’s blueprint. The Rockets are taking 43 percent of their shots from behind the arc this season, most in the league. In D’Antoni’s first season with Phoenix, the 2004-05 Suns were No. 1 in the league at 29 percent. They only shot more as the years went on.

For haters, this is the true hallmark of a D’Antoni team. The Suns were actually average on defense in most years — you don’t win 60 games with a straight-up bad defense — but the skew toward scoring was always apparent. The Rockets are currently No. 4 in offense and No. 21 in defense. The ’04-05 Suns were Nos. 1 and 17, respectively. The Rockets’ overall pace numbers are nothing special until you adjust for their high rate of offensive rebounds. Taking those into account reveals that, indeed, Houston is an up-tempo team.

We’ll dig deeper in comparing James Harden to Steve Nash in a moment, but in a basic way they are similar. They attack in idiosyncratic ways, they can shoot and get to the rim, they are smart and willing passers and, most importantly, they need to visit a barber.

As a connoisseur of those old Suns, there are a few things I just can’t get over when watching these Rockets.

On the most amazing things about the old Suns was that they could play at a breakneck speed without turning it over. A reliance on threes, dunks (hello, young Amar’e Stoudemire), and layups simplified things to a degree, but the fact that Nash averaged just three turnovers per game while racking up 11 assists is pretty impressive.

Meanwhile, the Rockets are near the bottom of the league in turnover rate, and Harden is neck and neck with Russell Westbrook in the race to set a new NBA record for most turnovers in a season with 5.6 per game. The Suns were freewheeling but tight. The Rockets are just freewheeling.

By dominant I mean that Harden dominates what the Rockets do far more than Nash ever dominated what the Suns did. While Harden does have a similar assist rate to heyday-era Nash, The Beard is obviously a much more potent scorer. Nash never averaged 20 points per game in Phoenix. In fact, in ’04-05, he averaged just 15.5 points per game. Harden is averaging nearly double that this season.

Usage rate is a good indicator of ball dominance. If five players shared possessions equally, each would have a usage rate of 20. Nash’s Phoenix usage rates were consistently between 20 and 23. Harden’s is almost 34. This is the vogue, certainly: Westbrook, DeMarcus Cousins, and Anthony Davis also have incredibly high usage rates, something that was rather rare in Nash’s day.

But that difference between Harden’s ball dominance and Nash’s lack of such is a major key to the difference between the D’Antoni Suns and the D’Antoni Rockets. It makes Houston far less democratic on offense. Given the Rockets’ roster — there’s no Amar’e Stoudemire, Shawn Marion, Joe Johnson, or Boris Diaw here — that’s a good thing. Harden is just so good that you want him to have the ball as much as he can handle it, so long as his shooting efficiency remains sky-high. Nash would never likely have been an effective high-volume scorer, and the Suns had strong finishers and creators elsewhere.

Let’s be clear: Under D’Antoni, Phoenix’s defense was never what you would call good. It reached a peak of No. 13 in 2006-07. But the fundamentals of the defense — shooting defense — were never weak. The Suns typically ranked in the top 12 in shooting defense under D’Antoni, and usually near the top of the league in foul rate. In other words, they didn’t give up easy points. Where their defense suffered was on the glass (due to playing small and rotating out into a fast offense) and by not forcing many turnovers.

Houston, meanwhile, forces plenty of turnovers and rebounds rather well. But the Rockets have the No. 22 shot defense in the league and foul too much. Those old Suns had Marion, Johnson, Raja Bell, and Diaw. The Rockets have ... Patrick Beverley. (It’s worth noting that Houston has been exceptionally better since Beverley got healthy. As such, the defense might escape pure mediocrity soon enough.) Trevor Ariza and Clint Capela have moments, but the former needs to prove regularly he still has it and the latter needs to prove he can grow into a legitimate rim-protecting role.

The Suns under D’Antoni averaged 58 wins per season. The Rockets are on pace for 59. But in an aesthetic, stylistic sense as described above, this isn’t quite the rebirth of Seven Seconds Or Less. Too much about Harden, specifically, is too different from Nash, often in good ways.

There actually is a Mike D’Antoni team that these Rockets are truly reminiscent of: the much-maligned, Now This Is Going To Be Fun 2012-13 Los Angeles Lakers.

That roster was supposed to give Kobe Bryant the top-drawer point guard he’d never had in Nash, and was supposed to pair Dwight Howard with Pau Gasol in a fierce, big two-way frontcourt. Due to injuries and internecine drama, it didn’t really work out. D’Antoni took over 10 games into the season and did manage get the club a few games above .500 and into the playoffs. But Kobe tore his Achilles, ruining the postseason and the following season, which would be D’Antoni and Nash’s last in L.A.

Underneath the bitter dismay, the 2012-13 Lakers and this year’s Rockets had many of the same ingredients. Even without great shooters, the Lakers took a high rate of threes (third in the NBA). L.A. skewed toward offense (No. 9 in offense and No. 20 in defense), and played up-tempo (No. 5 in pace).

Like these Rockets and unlike those old Suns, the Lakers were turnover prone but strong on the offensive boards. Like these Rockets and unlike those old Suns, the Lakers had a poor shooting defense but decent defensive rebounding and turnover creation.

Most importantly, those Lakers had a ball-dominant offensive weapon who shot a ton: Kobe. Remember, Nash always had a usage rate under 23 in Phoenix. Harden has a usage rate is around 34. Kobe under D’Antoni sat at 32.

Harden is essentially playing like Kobe from that ’12-13 Lakers season with two key differences: he’s getting about twice as many assists (with twice as many turnovers) and he’s a substantially more efficient scorer.

The comparison isn’t perfect, especially in the frontcourt, where the Lakers played way bigger than do the Rockets. But if you’re looking for the right Harden comparison from D’Antoni’s oeuvre, 2012-13 Kobe Bryant is your best bet. In some ways, Harden is putting together the best of Kobe (scoring potency) and the best of Nash (efficiency and playmaking). And the Rockets are, at this point, clearly better than the injury-ridden Lakers were.

In the end, it proves that even D’Antoni’s ugly teams have a framework for beauty tucked within. (The Knicks need not apply.)

Shout out to Basketball-Reference.com for the historical data.