Many people know that Mike D’Antoni is currently the head coach of the NBA’s Houston Rocket, but what many forget is that Mike got his start as a basketball player. The former basketball player practiced the game professionally from 1973 to 1990 and has been a coach from 1990 to present. He earned the nickname Arsene Lupin due to his ability to steal the ball. It proves what an excellent player he was.
With his vast experience as a coach, having worked with several teams, he twice won the NBA Coach of the Year award. Here’s everything you need to know about NBA coach Mike D’Antoni.
The biography of Mike D’Antoni
Michael Andrew D’Antoni, born September 8, 1951, is an Italian-American who grew up in the town of Mullens, West Virginia. He attended Mullens High School before continuing his college education at Marshall University, Huntington. In high school, he was already interested in basketball and the trend continued until college where he played for the Marshall Thundering Herd Men’s basketball team for three years.
He was drafted by the NBA in 1973 after college. He then played professionally for several NBA and American Basketball Association (ABA) teams. He was then signed by ‘Olimpia Milano’, an Italian side, where he became the club’s top scorer, helping the club win five Italian League titles. Towards the end of his career, Mike D’Antoni was selected for the Italian men’s senior national team at the Eurobasket tournament in Yugoslavia in 1989.
Coaching career
He started his coaching career in 1990 with Olimpia Milano. After four seasons, he became coach of another Italian team, Benetton Treviso. His first NBA coaching job was in 1997 with the Denver Nuggets.
In 2002 he became an assistant coach while working with Phoenix Suns and the following year he became a head coach. He was an influential coach, known for placing values on three points. It was for his work that he won the NBA Coach of the Year award. In 2006, Mike D’Antoni was part of the coaching staff for the United States Olympic basketball team as well as the 2006 FIBA World Championship with a bronze medal.
His coaching career also took him to New York Knicks, but he resigned on March 14, 2012. The same year, he returned to the United States team as a Summer Olympics assistant coach. of 2012 in London. He also worked with the Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers. On June 1, 2016, he was named head coach of the Houston Rockets.
A professional twist on this seasoned trainer is that he co-wrote two Playmaker books with Dan Peterson and Vivendo Giacando with Tullio Lauro.
Net value
Mike D’Antoni has accumulated years of experience working with Italian and American basketball teams. As a result, the seasoned basketball coach has a net worth of $12 million. It is the accumulation of his salaries and bonuses that also constitute a significant part of his income.
Mike D’Antoni’s wife
Laurel D’Antoni (née Liebel) is the wife of Houston Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni. Before her marriage to Mike, Laurel was a model recruited by the Ford Modeling agency. For this reason, she shuttled between Manhattan, Tokyo, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. In 1984, she met Mike D’Antoni and they started going to watch games together. In 1986, the couple married and have an only child, Michael Alexander.
In 1990, she retired from modeling to take up the sports segment on Italian television. She quickly quit the program and got used to being a wife and mother. She has also been involved in community charities with her family and the Rockets team in general, helping others in the neighborhood where they reside.
brother, family
Mike D’Antoni was born to Lewis and Betty JoD’Antoni in Mullens, West Virginia. He was very close to his father who supported his career. Lewis was also a basketball coach, high school principal, and member of the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. His mother was an assistant county clerk. In 2017, he lost his father, who died at the age of 103. Mike said that although his father was expected to pass, he still felt sad.
Mike has dual citizenship, having roots in America and Italy. This explains his fluency in English and Italian. He became the first Italian to lead an NBA team.
Mike has an older brother, Joseph “Dan” D’Antoni. Like Mike, he was also a basketball player, but is currently the head coach of his college basketball team, the Marshall Thundering Herd Men’s Basketball Team. Both brothers, like their father, are members of the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. Dan D’Antoni worked as an assistant to his brother Mike on several teams, including the Phoenix Suns, New York Knicks, and Los Angeles Lakers.
In 2014, he was announced as the new head coach of Thundering Herd Men’s Basketball. Dan is married to Vanessa D’Antoni and they have three sons, Matt, Andrew and Nick, and a daughter, Morgan.