Less than six months after two coaches -- Alvin Gentry and Steve Kerr -- used his influence to take a 51-win team to 67 regular season victories and an NBA championship a year ago, Mike D’Antoni, widely regarded as the architect of today’s style of offense, is back in the league with the 76ers.

On a broad scale, it’s easy to see the NBA evolution D’Antoni has spurred on in the decade plus since his revolutionary run with the Phoenix Suns. Teams around the league have adopted a faster pace to their offenses. Stretch bigs, once considered something of a novelty act, are now considered an essential element to offensive success. The spread pick-and-roll has replaced the post as the primary means to generate points. Even more abstract happenings like ball movement, spacing and offensive flow/freedom are a direct result of his uber successful Suns squads.

But the real testament to his influence can be seen in how teams around the league implement not just his overarching style, but his actual plays. Even as the league is evolving in new and (mostly) exciting ways, coaches are reaching back into the past to take D’Antoni’s concepts and use them for their own squads. One of the sets that’s becoming commonplace is an old staple D’Antoni utilized when he was with David Lee and the New York Knicks called Delay Double Quick:

The basics of the play are quite simple. A point guard pushes the ball up the floor as his teammates run their lanes -- two wings in the corner, a four man in the “slot” opposite the ballhandler and the center running on the midline, the term used for the imaginary line from rim to rim. As they get into an operating area around the 3-point line, the ballhandler swings it to the 5 (Lee in this case) and then one or pairs of players on each side of the center screen away from for each before getting into some type of dribble hand-off or pick-and-roll.

At it’s core, the play is basically designed to shift the defense some before getting into the meat of D’Antoni’s preferred style of attack: a pick-and-roll with the floor spaced around them. Lee was especially great at all the skills required of the big in this play -- he could handle, pass and finish well after quickly rolling to the rim. Lee often took this a step further, as seen in the clip above, by mixing up what player would actually receive the ball after both sides screened. Typically, bigs will just pass to the nearest player popping up towards them, but Lee would occasionally bypass the obvious ‘next-man’ pass for a teammate two passes away, messing slightly with the defense’s ability to handle the upcoming pick-and-roll.

Now while Delay Double Quick is a clever concept as far as sets go, most plays have elements that are tricky or effective, which is why, ya know, teams run them. But where D’Antoni’s true offensive mastery comes into the picture is when you look at the use of this play in context of his personnel.

When D’Antoni was in Phoenix, he had Steve Nash. If you go back and watch those teams play, you’ll see a lot of Nash in pick-and-roll and very little else. After all, why would you want Amar’e Stoudamire catching at the 3-point and dribbling around when you had Nash? In New York, D’Antoni didn’t have an MVP point guard, but he did have a skilled, mobile big man with the passing and finishing skills to help create good looks in his system. So instead of having a rotating cast of mediocre Knick point guards trigger the offense from a straightforward pick-and-roll, D’Antoni would use plays like Delay Double Quick to shift some of the playmaking responsibility to Lee instead.

If you’re looking for a reason why people call D’Antoni “brilliant” and “innovative”, this is it. D’Antoni is not necessarily a basketball version of Will Hunting that can solve all the complex riddles of the sport on his whiteboard, he’s just smart enough to put his best players in good spots with the space around them to show off their talents. While that seems obvious, you’d be amazed at how often coaches at all levels of the sport struggle to accomplish this feat because of how easy it is to lose sight of the forest for the trees (related: coaching is hard).

Having a skilled and/or undersized 5-man around four perimeter players was still pretty rare (sans Don Nelson-coached teams) despite the fact it was just five years ago that D’Antoni and Lee worked together in New York. Today, however, it’s a fairly common scenario. And because of the heavy volume of pick-and-rolls during games, NBA teams are always looking for tricky ways to bend a defense before getting into them. Because of those reasons, along with D’Antoni’s general effect on players and coaches, Delay Double Quick is popping up all over the league, starting with Lee’s current team in Boston:

Then there’s this fairly skilled big man in Chicago named Joakim Noah who also possesses the dribbling, passing, rolling chops to benefit from such a set, which the Bulls turn to every once awhile when stretch big Nikola Mirotic shares the frontcourt with Noah:

The very sharp Terry Stotts has also included it in the Trail Blazers repertoire as well. And though Mason Plumlee doesn’t remind people of peak David Lee, using this action with Blazers guards CJ McCollum and/or Damian Lillard setting and/or receiving screens before heading into pick-and-rolls is very tough on a defense.  

And of course D’Antoni disciple Alvin Gentry isn’t going to miss out on a chance to use Anthony Davis as a souped up version of Lee and let him go to work on opponents:

Given their small-ball revolution, Indiana coach Frank Vogel has also added Delay Double Quick to his playbook, actually using Jordan Hill -- who played for D’Antoni in L.A. -- as his trigger man:

While D’Antoni used this play because of Lee and, later, Pau Gasol during his last year with the Lakers, the teams above use it for a variety of reasons. Portland doesn’t have an insanely skilled big man, but they do have perimeter players that are nightmares to deal with in off-ball screening situations -- just like Golden State. The Pacers are in the same boat as far as Hill goes, but they also have something most teams running this play don’t have: a power forward named Paul George who can run pick-and-roll like a point guard, much like a young Danilo Gallinari did for D’Antoni when they were with the Knicks.

Those connections right there are why D’Antoni gets hailed as such an offensive genius. He didn’t just design clever sets, he changed the way coaches thought to utilize their personnel. Delay Double Quick popping up around the league is just a tangible example of that.

And as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s true, Mike D’Antoni is going to be pretty damned flattered during his return to the bench this season.