Knicks1969 wrote:nixluva wrote:Knicks1969 wrote:I am not sure if Jose will be able to be productive, but the fact that he can't defend opposing PGs is and will always be an issue. My biggest worry going into the season is FISHER. Has he improved as a coach?
A lot of what you think is the coach is actually the players you have running the team on the floor!!! Guarantee you that any team that has Jason Kidd in his prime running it will operate well REGARDLESS of the coach. I understand not thinking Fisher was making the right in game decisions, but in terms of what most teams actually do it really is mostly about the players. Just looking at who was running the offense last year it's easy to imagine it having a negative impact on how the team ran.
Fisher is not just making this up as he goes along. He's got a proven system that puts most of the decision making in the hands of the players. That's how the Triangle works. You don't call plays. It's a free flowing system that is directed by the guards at the start and then everyone on the floor has specific rules for which action to take next depending on where the ball goes first and what the defense does in response. It's on the players on the floor to make it work. This is why most games you rarely saw Phil say or do anything unless there was something specific he saw that he wanted to get across. He was never standing up and barking directions all game.
When you have vocal dudes like Jordan/Pippen/Shaq/Kobe, you really don't have to do much. Phil uses other subliminal ways to turn the system into a success. There is a reason why others have failed coaching the triangle. I hope Fisher the best of luck. I hope Aflalo and a healthy Jose can help this dude when they are on the court.
Jim Calhoun:
“What the triangle gave the Bulls and the Lakers was an organized way to put five players on the same page,” he added. “It’s not a miracle cure. It creates freedom.”
The Triangle has been used by College programs and High School Programs for years. In the NBA it has run into issues because none of Phil's guys have had the full support of the GM to run the Triangle. You can't be successful with it if you don't have a full commitment to it. Phil is a great coach outside of the offense he chose to run, but the Triangle Offense has been used successfully by other coaches outside the NBA who aren't under the constraints of the WIN NOW mode of the NBA.
Jordan initially resisted the Triangle and made things difficult for Phil. Phil had to use every trick in the book because there was no getting rid of Jordan. Jordan eventually came to the light but it wasn't immediate. The same thing happened in NY for Fish. What Phil did was get rid of guys who weren't buying in. Phil also knows that it takes time and unlike other GM's who had no patience for the Triangle, Phil knows better.
In 1989, Jackson became the Bulls’ head coach, and he told the team that he planned to run Winter’s system.“This triangle offense!” forward Horace Grant said, recalling the introduction of a reactive style of play to athletes who valued aggression. “Believe me, with the Bulls, we started running it — we thought that it was Stephen Hawking talking to us. If you never, ever spoke Mandarin in your life, it was trying to learn Mandarin in the first year.
“We were stepping on one another’s feet, falling down. Everybody thought Tex was crazy, and we thought Phil was crazy for listening to him. In the beginning, we all rebelled. We wanted to run and dunk. Athletes don’t want fundamentals. You want to run like a gazelle! Like a Doberman!”
One reason for the Pistons’ success against Chicago in the years before Jackson took over was that Detroit’s physicality wore Jordan down. Jackson and Winter’s thinking was that if they built more offensive options around him, Jordan would have greater reserves of energy at the end of playoff games. They told Jordan that for 20 seconds, the team would stay in the offense. If no clear scoring opportunities emerged, then he should create one. Jordan was skeptical; he called the triangle “a white man’s offense.”
Grant remembers what Winter’s practices were like. “Every day we began with passing, cutting and screening,” he said. “Every day. Every single day. Fundamental basketball. We weren’t bored. It was so intriguing to us. We wanted to learn something different. We’d been not so successful in the playoffs.”
Eventually, Grant said, all of the players were converted.
“You need intelligence to run Triangle,” Grant said. “We have great one-on-one athletes out there in the N.B.A., but to be as one, you need to know your role in Triangle. When the defense shuts 10 options down, we have 10 more. If a pass goes to the corner, we as a team know where to set screens, where to cut. Pass goes into the post to Bill Cartwright, we know all the picks on the other side of the floor.
“It was a smooth operating machine. Baryshnikov in action! Picasso painting! A beautiful thing! Having Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen helped, too. Shot clock’s at four, it all breaks down, then Jordan time.”
Jackson said that only after the Bulls finally defeated the Pistons in 1991 did Jordan embrace the offense, and Krause remembered it the same way.
“Michael’s smart as hell,” Krause said. “It took him a few months, but then he realized what he could do in Triangle. He went back to Carolina, and all he did all summer was work on post stuff. For the next eight or 10 years, he scored more points in the post than most centers did.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/sports/basketball/phil-jackson-knicks-triangle-offense-nba.html?_r=0
8/29/2015 10:33 AM