Nice article talking about the Triangle from Phil's opponents and his supporters point of view.
Triangle Offense Has Its Defenders and Skeptics
By HARVEY ARATON MARCH 17, 2014People tend to listen when Phil Jackson talks, or tweets, even in August, traditionally the N.B.A.’s tune-out season.
Last summer, while most pro basketball people were lounging on vacation, a bristling Jackson launched a stealth attack by posting three messages during a three-hour span on Twitter, targeting critics of his beloved triangle offense.
“Pundits say triangle is passé,” he wrote in one. “Tired of hearing it used as excuse for players. System basketball takes dedicated coaching basic skills.”
In a second missive, he wrote: “Footwork, passing, reading defense, and team work — the state of bball now is s/roll which is controlled by the dribbler is the easy way out.” He was referring to the all-too-common and predictable use of the screen-and-roll to generate offense.
Jackson concluded: “What was frowned on was to hold the ball and disrupt the rhythm since players were in motion off-ball, but individual has to be aggressive.”
Phil Jackson won 11 titles using the triangle offense, which maximizes ball and body movement.
Jackson could decide that the Knicks’ personnel does not fit the triangle, a free-flowing offensive scheme designed to maximize ball and body movement. But those who thought that Jackson’s return to the franchise he played for in the 1970s, when it won its only two championships, was in the stars might also appreciate that the Knicks’ logo is configured inside a triangle.
Jackson did not invent sharing the basketball — he learned the beauty of that playing in New York for Red Holzman. Nor did he invent the triangle — he was schooled on it as an assistant coach in Chicago by a colleague, Tex Winter, an innovator in the use of the triangle (or triple post) offense after playing a version of it for Coach Sam Barry during the 1940s at Southern California.
Winter, 92, now suffers from dementia. Jackson has become the triangle’s only modern N.B.A. champion — and he won a record 11 titles while using it as a head coach in Chicago and Los Angeles. His brief Twitter rant reveals the chasm that exists between Jackson and other coaches, many of whom consider him too critical of the contemporary game and condescending about how much the triangle figured in his own success.
Asked to comment on the efficacy of the triangle, several coaches — including the San Antonio Spurs’ Gregg Popovich, the league’s most tenured and successful over the last 20 years, outside Jackson — declined the opportunity. But Jim Cleamons, a longtime Jackson assistant, acknowledged the tensions.
“Some coaches, they would irritate or disappoint me with some of their comments,” Cleamons, an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, said before a recent game against the Knicks. “We’ve never said that was the only way to play, or the best way to play. It’s just a way to play.”
Despite the presence of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal (for three of Jackson’s five titles) in Los Angeles, few would dispute Jackson’s integral role as a master strategist and motivator. It is the spiritualization of his success — what some believe to be a marketing ploy — that has produced an ample amount of eye-rolling.
In his 1995 book, “Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior,” Jackson wrote: “The day I took over the Bulls, I vowed to create an environment based on the principles of selflessness and compassion I’d learned as a Christian in my parents’ home; sitting on a cushion practicing Zen; and studying the teachings of the Lakota Sioux.”
He wrote that he used the triangle as a means of bringing “cooperation and freedom, the very values I’d spent my life pursuing off the court and dreamed of applying to the game.”
On a more practical level, Jackson also convinced the supremely talented Jordan that his best chance of winning was within a more patterned offense.
Cleamons noted: “No matter what your system is, that’s got to be the first hurdle. So what’s happened with the triangle, because we won so much, it’s taken on a life of its own. But Tex always said that it’s basically a junior high school offense, based on the simple principle that any one of three positions — a guard, forward or center — can be your post player.
“At any time you can pass the ball to any of your four teammates, and if the defense takes any of those passes away, there’s a logical sequential action that takes place after that. If they take away all four passes, then you have an opportunity to drive the ball to the basket.”
Jim Cleamons, a longtime Phil Jackson assistant, said, “We’ve never said that was the only way to play, or the best way to play.”
Jackson has lamented how the N.B.A. game relies too heavily on the point guard to create off the dribble or a high screen. He espouses the near-rhythmic movement of five players to connect stars to their teammates.
Scott Williams, a center/forward who played for Jackson’s Bulls in the early 1990s and is an assistant coach for Milwaukee, credited the triangle with benefiting less-talented players.
“I had opportunities to have the basketball, make passes, make cuts, set picks,” he said. “It wasn’t just being parked out on an island like I was for the years after that when I went to Philly — all right, you two guys stand over here in the parking lot and when the shot goes up, try to get in there and give us an offensive rebound.”
But even in a copycat universe, the perception has been that the triangle, while great for Jackson’s teams, is not advisable for others. Unlike Popovich, whose Spurs teams also stress ball movement and spacing, Jackson has not had many assistants claim head coaching positions. Some were said to be handicapped because of their reputations as triangle acolytes.
Yet Mike Fratello, the television analyst who coached against Jackson during tenures in Atlanta, Cleveland and Memphis, said that many teams, including San Antonio, had incorporated triangle concepts related to positional strategy into their offenses. They just hate to admit it.
“Without question, there are pieces of it being used along with the other stuff they are running,” Fratello said.
Cleamons added: “You got a lot of teams now that run what they call elbow. Elbow is one of our strong-side actions. They’re all given new names, but many of these things are part of the triangle.”
Why the fear of the triangle in total? “Right now, you got kids coming out of college one year removed from high school and they don’t have skills,” Cleamons said. “It takes time to teach, and guys think they have to win now.”
As a rookie executive, Jackson may have similar pressure in New York. A possible clue for what he considers the ideal triangle player could be found among the 37 people he follows on Twitter. Among four active N.B.A. players is Joakim Noah, the most versatile and team-oriented big man in the league.
Fratello, who has not coached since 2007, said he never resented Jackson and added: “I liked the triangle — it gave you more options than the N.B.A. norm of the point guard dominating the ball. If run right, it connected people.”
Even people who did not much get along. Bryant and O’Neal feuded constantly while winning three titles with the Lakers. In Chicago, Jackson and the longtime Bulls executive Jerry Krause barely spoke by the end of the team’s six-championship run in 1998 and then had no contact until 2011, when Winter was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Krause, who hired Jackson, said at the time that he shook his hand out of respect for Winter. The triangle worked again.
3/15/2014 11:37 AM