Author: rb809rb

Mark Few’s coached many current and former NBA players and coaches.

One can measure Gonzaga University men’s basketball coach Mark Few’s Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame career with a basic resumé.

• Two NCAA Final Fours.
• Twenty-seven consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances.
• Twenty-seven consecutive seasons with at least 23 victories, including 37 wins in 2016-17, the year the Bulldogs lost to North Carolina in the national championship game.
• Nearly three dozen players who played in the NBA, including seven lottery picks, multiple All-Stars and 11 players who were on NBA rosters at the start of the 2025-26 season.
• Two-time National Association of Basketball Coaches and Naismith coach of the year.
• Few’s overall record is 773-156, a .832 winning percentage.

He took the basketball program at Gonzaga, a small, private Catholic school with 5,200 undergraduate students in Spokane, Washington, from mid-major to major-major – a perennial power for nearly three decades.

Few was elected to the Hall in April and will be inducted Saturday in Springfield, Massachusetts.

“Where I come from, a little tiny town (Creswell) in Oregon, it wasn’t a dream come true. You couldn’t even possibly dream about something like this happening,” Few said. “But the biggest emotion and feeling that I’ve had is just this incredible, overwhelming flush of just gratitude for everybody, every step of the way.”

So that’s one way to measure Few’s impact on basketball. Another way is to listen to NBA coaches Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors and Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat – two of the best in the game.

Kerr was the head coach of the United States’ 2023 FIBA World Cup team and 2024 Paris Olympics team, and Spoelstra and Few were assistants.

“My kind of guy. He just gets it,” Kerr said at the Paris Olympics. “He’s passionate about the game, passionate about life, passionate about his family. Humble enough to know that he doesn’t have all the answers, but driven and smart enough to seek the answers. And above all, he loves being part of the staff. And so, the dinners and the coaches’ meetings, there’s great humor and joy. He’s just somebody I want to be around every day.”

Spoelstra has known about Few for almost 40 years – Spoelstra played at the University of Portland in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Few was an assistant at Gonzaga.

“I’ve been a fan of his and rooted for him and rooted for the program,” Spoelstra said.

Spoelstra will coach the U.S. at the 2027 FIBA World Cup and 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and Few will be an assistant for those teams, too.

“Even with the success that they’ve had, he is one of the most underrated coaches in all of basketball,” Spoelstra said. “He’s a first ballot Hall of Famer. And he’s so humble and understated. He doesn’t want any of the credit.”

Few began his coaching career as an unpaid assistant at Creswell High School in 1986 and joined Gonzaga as a graduate assistant in 1989. He was promoted to full-time assistant coach in 1990 and took over as head coach in 1999. He has had chances to leave for other jobs.

“My dad (Norm) in that little, tiny town of Creswell was 54 years a Presbyterian minister at this little, tiny church,” Few said. “And usually ministers move every five years or eight years or whatever. The congregation gets tired of them. It’s 54 years. Probably when I was younger – I would never admit it – but as you get older, you’re like, ‘You know what, we tend to mimic who we admire.’”

Few stayed and stayed some more, building one of the top programs in college hoops and coaching players such as Adam Morrison, Kelly Olynyk, Domantas Sabonis, Rui Hachimura, Jalen Suggs, Andrew and Ryan Nembhard and Chet Holmgren.

“Just feeling just so blessed to just have so many awesome, awesome players that came through this program,” he said on the Mark Few Show. “They not only were awesome players on the floor, talented and so easy to coach and competitive, but just awesome people. Any coach will tell you, at the end of the day, it’s all about your players, and we’ve just had an amazing run. And then also, I mean, just so lucky and so fortunate to have just crazy talented and hardworking assistant coaches over the years who have helped so much.

“I’ve had nothing but great basketball minds who also really understand how to deal with people and just became great friends too. It’s just been a joy, but never, ever, ever would’ve ever thought I’d even be considered for such a thing. It’s extremely, extremely humbling and a huge, huge honor.”

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Mike D’Antoni credits much of his success to Steve Nash, who saw the game much the same way he did.

Mike D’Antoni’s coaching influences sprang from West Virginia, where he played prep basketball at Mullens High School and college basketball at Marshall. They came from Europe where D’Antoni had a stellar career as one of the best point guards in Italy’s top pro league and from Doug Moe who D’Antoni played for briefly in the NBA.

The amalgamation of those influences provided inspiration for D’Antoni who as a coach ushered in a style of basketball that altered the direction of the NBA and college hoops.

Play fast, spread the court, shoot 3-pointers, attack the rim and see what happens when you play your five best players regardless of size.

When D’Antoni got his chance to see what that kind of offense could do as head coach of the Phoenix Suns in 2003, he flourished and began cementing his reputation as an offensive innovator.

“Most coaches are the products of all the past experiences, and I had a lot,” he said. “Even growing up, the teams I always played on in high school and in college at Marshall, we were always undersized and fast and were really successful. And then as you get into the pros, you just follow your coaches.”

For his accomplishments as a head coach in Italy and with the Suns, New York Knicks, Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets, D’Antoni will be enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Saturday. He enters the Hall as a contributor.

“It’s just an unbelievably proud moment, and I’m deeply honored,” D’Antoni said. “It’s something that I didn’t expect.”

Expected or not, his impact on basketball is undeniable. In 16 seasons as an NBA head coach, D’Antoni was 672-527 in the regular season and 54-56 in the playoffs. He earned Coach of the Year honors in 2004-05 and 2016-17, took three teams to the Western Conference Finals (Phoenix in 2005 and 2006 and Houston in 2018) and coached two players in their MVP seasons (Steve Nash twice and James Harden once).

His first full season with the Suns in 2004-05 featured Steve Nash, Amar’e Stoudemire, Shawn Marion, Joe Johnson and Quentin Richardson. They started 31-4 and finished 62-20. The Suns led the league in scoring (110.4 points per game), offensive efficiency (114.5 points per 100 possessions) and pace (95.9). They were No. 1 in 3s made (9.7 per game), 3s attempted (24.7 per game) and 3-point shooting percentage (.393).

They confounded the rest of the league – it was in some ways an antidote to Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan and other paint-dominant big men – and D’Antoni’s Suns set in motion an offensive style that permeates today. Last season, the Golden State Warriors – their success and four championships are not lost on D’Antoni – shot 44.1 3s per game and even the No. 30 team in 3s attempted per game, the Sacramento Kings, shot 30.2 per game.

They weren’t the first team to play fast, shoot a lot of 3s or play small, especially at center and power forward, but D’Antoni combined those methods in a way that pushed offensive innovation. Those Suns were immortalized in Jack McCallum’s book :07 Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin’ and Gunnin’ Phoenix Suns.

“A coach is only as good as his players are,” D’Antoni said. “And I got really lucky.”

D’Antoni named a handful of those players, but none were as instrumental in executing his vision as Nash, who saw the game similarly and had the skillset as a ballhandler, passer and shooter to make it work. Nash had a gift for quickly exploiting defensive weaknesses.

“I got lucky with Steve Nash,” D’Antoni said. “You always hear through the years, you have a good point guard, you’re going to be successful as a team. I was just trying to maximize the point guard, trying to maximize spacing, use the three. And I just went with it. You tweak it every year, you do a little bit different. You have different personnel. But the basics were there. It started in Italy and I just kind of ran with it.”

As a player, especially in Italy, D’Antoni acknowledged he wasn’t a great finisher in the paint, so he liked shooting 3s. As a coach in Italy, he was enamored with the skillset of Europeans no matter what position they played. Ballhandling, passing and shooting from all areas of the court were necessary for all players, and D’Antoni also became frustrated with a paint area clogged with defenders.

“The one thing that I was able to jump on real quick was the big guys. I thought they were much more skilled,” D’Antoni said. “They could shoot the 3, they could run, they could handle the ball. We could do a lot of different things, and I could open up the game a lot more because of their skill. So that was probably the influence that Europe gave me was that you can play five out because you’re center and four guy and everybody, you have five skilled players on the court.”

With success in Italy – two Italian league championships, two Italian Supercup titles and a EuroLeague Final Four appearance – D’Antoni craved an opportunity to see if his offensive ideas would work in the NBA. He also admitted that came with consternation.

“I was insecure as a coach coming back to the NBA whether it would work or not,” he said.

Besides players, D’Antoni benefited from rules changes that favored offense – defensive three seconds, restrictions on perimeter hand-checking – and an ownership and front-office group led by Jerry Colangelo and Bryan Colangelo that were open to D’Antoni’s ideas.

“I had the right personnel, and it all fell into place,” D’Antoni said. “And whether I could see that or not, I always wanted to play that way. It was the best way to go for us. I had the right personnel and the right owners and the right general manager and we all just went with it.”

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