The zen master did not approve of D’Antoni’s hire

Phil Jackson recently went on the ‘Mike & Mike In The Morning Show’ to talk about a few basketball related topics. One of those topics was the hiring of Mike D’Antoni for the Lakers’ head coaching job. When asked about how he reacted to Lakers’ GM Mitch Kupchak telling him that they would hire Mike D’Antoni, Jackson simply said “I laughed.” Jackson explains why he laughed at the hire,

“When Mitch gave me the call close to midnight on Sunday night right before I was going to give them an answer Monday morning and said, ‘We’ve made a choice. We’re going to hire Mike D’Antoni. We think he’s the best coach for this group of guys,’ My answer was, ‘For Steve Nash, yes, I agree, but for Dwight Howard, I’m not so sure.’”

From the looks of it Jackson was probably right, not because D’Antonio is a bad coach it was just the wrong system for Dwight Howard. If you watched the Lakers this year you could see the difficulty Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard had fitting in to D’Antoni’s fast paced system.

– John McAuliffe (@John_Mac310)

Source – ESPN