Back in training camp, when there still was hope for the season on which the Pelicans and new coach Alvin Gentry were embarking, Gentry responded to a question about his reputation as an up-tempo coach with little regard for defense. It wasn’t the case, he said. He valued defense, but it made sense to him to play with speed, a lesson he took from his time with the Suns as both an assistant and head coach.

“I learned how to do that from Mike D’Antoni, and I think he is the best there is at it,” Gentry said. “But you have got to play to the personnel you have.”

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Very often in today’s NBA, teams have latched on to the first part of Gentry’s statement while ignoring the second. As the Rockets move to officially make D’Antoni their new head coach, you have to wonder whether anyone is getting the message. Yes, it is fun and entertaining to win the way D’Antoni’s Suns did in that amazing stretch from 2004-08. But you can’t win that way unless you had the kind of players Phoenix did in that era.

Specifically, if you want to run the way D’Antoni’s teams did in that era you need Steve Nash, or some semblance of Nash, at point guard. The Warriors have been successful with some D’Antoni-style principles, but only because they have Stephen Curry and a slew of ballhandlers and 3-point marksmen. If you don’t have those, you’d better slow down your offense.

No one has ever confused Patrick Beverley, or James Harden for that matter, for Nash or Curry. And no one has ever seen D’Antoni coach any way but in the style he used in Phoenix, even if he blatantly lacks the personnel. D’Antoni has typically coached to his system and not to his players, only to find that you can’t put beagles on a dirt track and expect them to turn into greyhounds.

D’Antoni keeps getting hired, though. The Rockets had better hope he is willing to change his stripes this time, because to achieve the same seven-seconds-or-less beauty D’Antoni achieved with the Suns, the roster must have players who are actually capable of playing fast. Teams still seem unable to grasp that.

Steve Nash and Mike D'Antoni in Phoenix (Getty Images)

Gentry’s Pelicans are Exhibit A. His roster never got fully healthy in New Orleans, so the argument could be made that Gentry would have had more success with a D’Antoni-style offense if not for injuries. But even when healthy, the Pelicans struggled. They ranked ninth in pace of play, but were only 18th in offensive efficiency. So they were creating a lot of possessions, as a good up-tempo offense should, but they were not particularly good at converting those possessions into points. New Orleans was 27th in defensive efficiency, though, so at least one team on the floor in Pelicans games was making good use of those extra possessions.

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There are other examples. The Pacers’ Larry Bird let coach Frank Vogel go, in part because he wanted to play faster, even though point guard George Hill is not a speedy ballhandler and is a subpar playmaker. Then Bird hired Nate McMillan, whose Blazers played at a famously plodding pace during his tenure in Portland.

The Wizards dumped Randy Wittman despite the fact that Wittman was nudged into trying to run a fast-paced offense he knew his team was not built to play. And if you ask coach Dwane Casey about the turning point for his Eastern Conference finalist Raptors, he will point to December 2012, when then-general manager Bryan Colangelo scrapped the team’s plans to play up-tempo and allowed Casey to go back to coaching defense first. Toronto was 4-19 at the time, but closed the year 30-29 after that.

Now in Houston, D’Antoni will have to learn the same lessons teams like the Pelicans, Wizards and Raptors have learned. He will also have to learn from his own post-Suns failures, which include a 121-167 record with the Knicks and a 67-87 two-year disaster with the Lakers. In both of those stops, D’Antoni clung to the principles that had been successful in Phoenix, despite having isolation-ball stars like Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant on the roster, and despite working with point guards like Chris Duhon, Raymond Felton, Steve Blake, Kendall Marshall and the end-of-career version of Nash.

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Perhaps this will change in Houston. The Rockets did about as thorough a job as possible in choosing their next coach, interviewing a dozen potential candidates, and a wide range of interesting names — Jeff Van Gundy, Stephen Silas, Kenny Smith — were at some time or another labeled, “frontrunners,” for the job. And indications are that they will look to hire a defensive-minded assistant head coach to ensure that D’Antoni’s offense-first emphasis will be more balanced than in his other head-coaching stops.

But mostly, D’Antoni needs to personally change the dynamic too many front offices and coaches have embraced in his name — the notion that implementing the old Suns’ system means your team is going to play and win like the old Suns did. If they have the players to run such a system, sure. Go for it. Few teams do, though, including D’Antoni’s new Rockets.