by Phil Jackson
Listening to Tex describe his brainchild, I realized that this was the missing link I had been searching for in the CBA. It was a more evolved version of the offense we’d run on the Knicks under Red Holzman, and, more to the point, it embodied the Zen Christian attitude of selfless awareness. In essence, the system was a vehicle for integrating mind and body, sport and spirit in a practical, down-to-earth form that anyone could learn. It was awareness in action.
The triangle offense is best described as five-man tai chi. The basic idea is to orchestrate the flow of movement in order to lure the defense off balance and create a myriad of openings on the floor. The system gets its name from one of the most common patterns of movement: the sideline triangle. Example: As Scottie Pippen moves the ball upcourt, he and two other players form a triangle on the right side of the floor about fifteen feet apart from each other—Steve Kerr in the corner, Luc Longley in the post and Scottie along the sideline. Meanwhile, Michael Jordan hovers around the top of the key and Toni Kukoc positions himself opposite Pippen on the other side of the floor. Next Pippen passes the ball into Longley, and everybody goes into a series of complex coordinated moves, depending on how the defense responds.
The point is not to go head-to-head with the defense, but to toy with the defenders and trick them into overextending themselves. That means thinking and moving in unison as a group and being acutely aware, at any given moment, of what’s happening on the floor. Executed properly, the system is virtually unstoppable because there are no set plays and the defense can’t predict what’s going to happen next. If the defense tries to prevent one move, the players will adjust instinctively and start another series of cuts and passes that often lead to a better shot.
At the heart of the system are what Tex calls the seven principles of a sound offense:
1. The offense must penetrate the defense. In order to run the system, the first step is to break through the perimeter of the defense, usually around the three-point line, with a drive, a pass, or a shot. The number-one option is to pass the ball into the post and go for a three-point power play.
2. The offense must involve a full-court game. Transition offense starts on defense. The players must be able to play end-to-end and perform skills at fast-break pace.
3. The offense must provide proper spacing. This is critical. As they move around the court, the players should maintain a distance of fifteen to eighteen feet from one another. That gives everybody room to operate and prevents the defense from being able to cover two players with one man.
4. The offense must ensure player and ball movement with a purpose. All things being equal, each player will spend around eighty percent of his time without the ball. In the triangle offense, the players have prescribed routes to follow in those situations, so that they’re all moving in harmony toward a common goal. When Toni Kukoc joined the Bulls, he tended to gravitate toward the ball when it wasn’t in his hands. Now he has learned to fan away from the ball and move to the open spots—making him a much more difficult player to guard.
5. The offense must provide strong rebounding position and good defensive balance on all shots. With the triangle offense, everyone knows where to go when a shot goes up to put themselves in a position to pick off the rebound or protect against the fast break. Location is everything, especially when playing the boards.
6. The offense must give the player with the ball an opportunity to pass the ball to any of his teammates. The players move in such a way so that the ballhandler can see them and hit them with a pass. That sets up the counterpoint effect. As the defense increases the pressure on one point on the floor, an opening is inevitably created somewhere else that the defenders can’t see. If the players are lined up properly, the ballhandler should be able to find someone in that spot.
7. The offense must utilize the players’ individual skills. The system requires everybody to become an offensive threat. That means they have to find what they do best within the context of the team. As John Paxson puts it, “You can find a way to fit into the offense, no matter what your strengths are. I wasn’t a creative player. I wasn’t going to take the ball and beat the other guys to the basket. But I was a good shooter, and the system played to my strength. It helped me understand what I did well and find the areas on the court where I could thrive.”
SURRENDERING THE “ME” FOR THE “WE”
What appealed to me about the system was that it empowered everybody on the team by making them more involved in the offense, and demanded that they put their individual needs second to those of the group. This is the struggle every leader faces: how to get members of the team who are driven by the quest for individual glory to give themselves over wholeheartedly to the group effort. In other words, how to teach them selflessness.
In basketball, this is an especially tricky problem. Today’s NBA players have a dazzling array of individual moves, most of which they’ve learned from coaches who encourage one-on-one play. In an effort to become “stars,” young players will do almost anything to draw attention to themselves, to say “This is me” with the ball, rather than share the limelight with others. The skewed reward system in the NBA only makes matters worse. Superstars with dramatic, eye-catching moves are paid vast sums of money, while players who contribute to the team effort in less flamboyant ways often make close to the minimum salary. As a result, few players come to the NBA dreaming of becoming good team players. Even players who weren’t standouts in college believe that once they hit the pros somehow the butterfly will emerge from the chrysalis. This is a hard one to refute because there are several players around the league who’ve come out of nowhere to find stardom.
The battle for players’ minds begins at an early age. Most talented players start getting special treatment in junior high school, and by the time they reach the pros, they’ve had eight years or more of being coddled. They have NBA general managers, sporting goods manufacturers, and assorted hucksters dangling money in front of them and an entourage of agents, lawyers, friends, and family members vying for their favor. Then there’s the media, which can be the most alluring temptress of all. With so many people telling them how great they are, it’s difficult, and, in some cases, impossible, for coaches to get players to check their inflated egos at the gym door.
Tex’s system helps undo some of this conditioning by getting players to play basketball with a capital B instead of indulging their self-interest. The principles of the system are the code of honor that everybody on the team has to live by. We put them on the chalkboard and talk about them almost every day. The principles serve as a mirror that shows each player how well they’re doing with respect to the team mission.
The relationship between a coach and his players is often fraught with tension because the coach is constantly critiquing each player’s performance and trying to get him to change his behavior. Having a clearly defined set of principles to work with reduces conflict because it depersonalizes the criticism. The players understand that you’re not attacking them personally when you correct a mistake, but only trying to improve their knowledge of the system.
Learning that system is a demanding, often tedious process that takes years to master. The key is a repetitive series of drills that train the players, on an experiential level as well as an intellectual one, to move, as Tex puts it, “like five fingers on a hand.” In that respect, the drills resemble Zen practice. After months of focusing intently on performing the drills in practice, the players begin to see—Aha! This is how all the pieces fit together. They develop an intuitive feel for how their movements and those of everyone else on the floor are interconnected.
Not everyone reaches this point. Some players’ self-centered conditioning is so deeply rooted they can’t make that leap. But for those who can, a subtle shift in consciousness occurs. The beauty of the system is that it allows players to experience another, more powerful form of motivation than ego-gratification. Most rookies arrive in the NBA thinking that what will make them happy is h
aving unlimited freedom to strut their egos on national TV. But that approach to the game is an inherently empty experience. What makes basketball so exhilarating is the joy of losing yourself completely in the dance, even if it’s just for one beautiful transcendent moment. That’s what the system teaches players. There’s a lot of freedom built into the process, but it’s the freedom that John Paxson talks about, the freedom of shaping a role for yourself and using all of your creative resources to work in unison with others.
When I started coaching, Dick Motta, a veteran NBA coach, told me that the most important part of the job takes place on the practice floor, not during the game. After a certain point you have to trust the players to translate into action what they’ve learned in practice. Using a comprehensive system of basketball makes it easier for me to detach myself in that way. Once the players have mastered the system, a powerful group intelligence emerges that is greater than the coach’s ideas or those of any individual on the team. When a team reaches that state, the coach can step back and let the game itself “motivate” the players. You don’t have to give them any “win one for the Gipper” pep talks; you just have to turn them loose and let them immerse themselves in the action.
During my playing days, the Knicks had that kind of feeling. Everyone loved playing with each other so much, we had an unspoken rule among ourselves about not skipping games, no matter what your excuse. Some players—Willis Reed was the most famous example—refused to sit out even when they could barely walk. What did pain matter? We didn’t want to miss the dance.
EASY RIDER
As it turned out, I got a chance to experiment with the triangle offense sooner than I expected. Toward the end of the 1988–89 season, the team went into a slide, and even though we made it to the conference finals, Jerry Krause lost faith in Doug Collins’ ability to push the team to the next level and decided to let him go.
The portrait the press has painted of Jerry over the years is not very flattering. He is extremely distrustful of reporters, having been burned by them in the past, and is so secretive that distortions inevitably occur. (In 1991, when The Jordan Rules—a book by Chicago Tribune writer Sam Smith that portrayed Krause as hard-headed, insensitive, and a bit of a schlemiel—came out, Jerry called me into his office and pointed out 176 “lies” he’d discovered in it.)
Jerry and I are bipolar opposites. He’s circumspect with the press; I’m overly trusting. He’s nervous and compulsive; I’m laid-back to the point of being almost comatose. We are both strong-willed and have had several flaming arguments over what to do with the team. Jerry encourages dissent, not just from me, but from everybody on the staff. But when he finally sits down to make a decision, he keeps his own counsel, a habit he developed as a scout.
Jerry loves to tell the story of Joe Mason, a former scout for the New York Mets. Several years ago, when Jerry was director of scouting for the Chicago White Sox, he noticed that Mason had a knack for finding great prospects that nobody else knew about. When Jerry asked his scouts what Mason’s secret was, they said he always ate alone and never shared information with anybody else. In other words, he was like Jerry Krause.
Jerry’s unorthodox style of management worked to my advantage. The NBA is a small exclusive club that’s extremely difficult to break into as a coach unless you’re connected with one of its four or five major cliques. Even though I had won a championship and been named Coach of the Year in the CBA, nobody was willing to take a chance on me except Krause. He didn’t care about my overblown reputation as a sixties flower child. All he wanted to know was whether I could help turn his team into a champion.
I must have passed the test. Jerry and I had worked together on the Bill Cartwright-Charles Oakley trade, and he was impressed by my ability to judge character. He also liked the fact that I had taken such a keen interest in the triangle offense, though he assured me that implementing it wouldn’t be a job requirement. Several days after he dismissed Collins, Jerry called me in Montana to offer me the head coaching job.
We had a party line then, and, in true Krausian fashion, he asked me to go to a more secure phone, at a gas station six miles away. After we finished talking, I jumped on my BMW motorcycle and headed back to the lake. My mind was racing as fast as the engine as I sped down the road. “Now that I’m a head coach,” I said to myself, easing off the throttle, “I guess I can’t take risks and be so outrageous.”
I thought that one over for a second and laughed. Then I gunned the bike all the way home.
Six
THE EYE OF BASKETBALL
Dreams are wiser than men.
—OMAHA SAYING
Call me Swift Eagle. That’s the name Edgar Red Cloud gave me during the 1973 basketball clinic that Bill Bradley and I conducted at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Edgar, the grandson of the famous chief Red Cloud, said I resembled an eagle as I swooped around the court with my arms outstretched, always looking to steal the ball. Swift Eagle. Ohnahkoh Wamblee. The name sounded like wings beating the air.
The elders of the tribe performed a naming ceremony for Bill and me in the high school gym. I found it amusing that the Lakota always gave outsiders exalted names—Bill’s was Tall Elk—while their own people had to settle for ones like Stinking Dog and Lame Deer. But I was honored by my name, and, in a funny way, it fit.
To Lakota warriors, the eagle is the most sacred of birds because of its vision and its role as a messenger to the Great Spirit. The famed Lakota holy man, Black Elk, painted a spotted eagle on his horse before going into battle to strengthen his eagle medicine. As a young boy, inflicted with a terminal illness, he had a vision detailed in his book, Black Elk Speaks, of leaving his body and flying, like an eagle, to the “high and lonely center of the earth,” where he saw “the shapes of all things in the spirit” and understood that “the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle.” Empowered by his vision, Black Elk recovered his health and grew into a warrior with exceptional mystical gifts.
Maybe Edgar Red Cloud had been gazing into the future when he gave me my new name. According to Jamie Sams and David Carson, authors of Medicine Cards, a book of Native American myths, the eagle represents “a state of grace achieved through hard work, understanding, and a completion of the tests of initiation which result in the taking of one’s personal power.”
My initiation, it seemed, was finally over.
THE EAGLE’S VIEW
My first act after being named head coach of the Bulls was to formulate a vision for the team. I had learned from the Lakota and my own experience as a coach that vision is the source of leadership, the expansive dream state where everything begins and all is possible. I started by creating a vivid picture in my mind of what the team could become. My vision could be lofty, I reminded myself, but it couldn’t be a pipe dream. I had to take into account not only what I wanted to achieve, but how I was going to get there.
At the heart of my vision was the selfless ideal of teamwork that I’d been experimenting with since my early days in the CBA. My goal was to give everyone on the team a vital role—even though I knew I couldn’t give every man equal playing time, nor could I change the NBA’s disproportionate system of financial rewards. But I could get the bench players to be more actively involved. My idea was to use ten players regularly and give the others enough playing time so that they could blend in effortlessly with everybody else when they were on the floor. I’ve often been criticized for leaving backups on the floor too long, but I think the cohesion it creates is more than worth the gamble. In Game 6 of the 1992 finals against the Portland Trail Blazers, we were down by 17 points in the third quarter and sinking fast. So I put in the second unit. The rest of the coaching staff, not to mention members of the press, thought I’d finally gone over the edge, but within minutes the subs wiped out the deficit and put us back in the game.
Tex Winter’s system would be my blueprint. But that alone wasn’t going to be enough. We needed to reinforce the les
sons the players were learning in practice, to get them to embrace the concept of selflessness wholeheartedly.
FISH DON’T FLY
When a fish swims in the ocean, there is no limit to the water, no matter how far it swims.
When a bird flies in the sky, there is no limit to the air, no matter how far it flies.
However, no fish or bird has ever left its element since the beginning.
This ancient Zen teaching holds great wisdom for anyone envisioning how to get the most out of a group. Just as fish don’t fly and elephants don’t play rock and roll, you can’t expect a team to perform in a way that’s out of tune with its basic abilities. Though the eagle may soar and fly close to the heavens, its view of the earth is broad and unclouded. In other words, you can dream all you want, but, bottom line, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. The team won’t buy your plan and everyone—most of all you—will end up frustrated and disappointed. But when your vision is based on a clear-sighted, realistic assessment of your resources, alchemy often mysteriously occurs and a team transforms into a force greater than the sum of its individual talents. Inevitably, paradoxically, the acceptance of boundaries and limits is the gateway to freedom.
But visions are never the sole property of one man or one woman. Before a vision can become reality, it must be owned by every single member of the group.