EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — While Mike D’Antoni hopes he is strong enough after knee replacement surgery to make his Lakers head coaching debut tonight against the Nets, a once tight friendship between superstars Dwight Howard and Deron Williams might also need healing.
Williams had tried to recruit Howard to the Nets during the seemingly endless “Dwightmare” saga that dragged into the summer before Howard was traded to the Lakers. Howard claimed yesterday after Lakers practice he sees no need to “smooth things over” with Williams.
“That’s my decision. It’s my life, so if he’s upset because I made a decision for me, so be it,” Howard said. “If he doesn’t want to be friends because I’m on another team, then so be it. There’s no need to smooth things over, you know?”
So that is just one little sidelight to tonight’s game at Staples Center, where the Nets will test their five-game winning streak against a high-powered Lakers offense that’s flourishing since D’Antoni was named to succeed Mike Brown. D’Antoni has not appeared on the sidelines but since he was formally introduced, the Lakers have scored 114 and 119 points in easy victories.
D’Antoni planned to coach Sunday against the Rockets but was overruled due to the risks involved. So he hopes to debut against the Nets.
“I’m going to try,” D’Antoni said. “We’ll see. We’ll talk to Gary [athletic trainer Vitti] [today] and see how it goes. Like Sunday, I tried and it didn’t work out. I don’t want to say, ‘Yeah’ and then don’t do it again.”
“It’s a lot better,” continued D’Antoni, who limped around practice when the media entered but exited using a crutch. “Every day it gets tenfold better. Then hopefully because of that I’ll be ready to go. But it’s soon.”
There remain problems of fatigue and the real possibility of being in the line of fire if a player dives his way for a loose ball. That scenario won’t disappear in two days.
“It won’t and that’s not the main reason why I [skipped Sunday]. I was listening to other things. But it sounded like a good sound bite,” D’Antoni joked.
“I’m anxious to go. Watching the game in the back is driving me crazy. I suffer more back there than I would on the floor. I want to just make sure it’s right. There’s no hurry on my part.”
So, D’Antoni was asked, what does he need to see from himself before he hits the sidelines?
“I got to go right a little bit better and I’ve got to work on my left hand,” he quipped. “I just want to make sure I don’t fall off the bench in the fourth quarter. I’m a three-quarter guy. I just got to make sure my stamina is up.”
He hopes it’s in place for the Nets.
“They’re good. Anytime you have Deron Williams and Joe Johnson in the backcourt they’re formidable,” D’Antoni said. “Now they’ve got Gerald Wallace healthy and Brook Lopez in the middle. They’re a good basketball team. Avery [Johnson] does a good job.”