New York’s Geometry Lesson
Phil Jackson has brought his famous triangle offense to New York, and the Knicks. Now everyone — including both players and fans — has to learn it.
Video by Bedel Saget, Vijai Singh and Joshua Davis on Publish Date October 28, 2014.The triangle. It means different things to different people. To most, the triangle is simply a three-sided shape. But the triangle is versatile. It is a musical instrument. It is a romantic entanglement. And it is a drafting tool for architects. Name another polygon that can do all that.
For long-suffering fans of the Knicks, though, the triangle has come to mean something much more — a source of hope after 41 years without a championship.
When Phil Jackson sat on a dais at Madison Square Garden on a chilly afternoon in March, he promised to change the culture of the franchise. A major part of that pledge involved dusting off the triangle offense, an unconventional scheme that helped him win 11 N.B.A. titles as coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Sure, intergalactic stars like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal played important roles in winning all those championships, but their operating platform was the triangle, and so the triangle’s mystique only grew. It looked different (no set plays) and felt different (nobody else in the league was running it) and sounded different (all those Jackson-inspired principles).
Yet a funny thing happened when Jackson left his position as coach of the Lakers in 2011. The triangle offense largely disappeared with him.
Well, it has returned. The Knicks will be running the triangle — or at least a fledgling version of it — under Coach Derek Fisher, Jackson’s handpicked protégé, when they open their season Wednesday night against the Bulls at the Garden.
The triangle has been impossible to avoid in recent months, try as you might. Consider that a search for the phrase “triangle offense” on the content aggregation site LexisNexis yields nearly 1,100 articles that have been published since January, a 435 percent spike over last year, when Jackson was relaxing at his beachfront home in Playa del Rey in Los Angeles.
Some publications capitalize the Triangle, as if it were an official title: the Shape among lesser shapes (sorry, rhombus), and the Offense among lesser offenses. Other news media outlets, including this one, settle for lowercase. Perhaps it is a matter of taste.
And while pretty much everyone has heard of the triangle by now, a highly unscientific survey of about a dozen fans before a recent preseason game at the Garden revealed a darker truth: Few really know what the offense involves.
“It’s three guys doing something,” said Evan Krefsky, 56, a caterer from Rockville Centre on Long Island.
Alisha Aldamuy, 20, who was working the yogurt stand at 16 Handles on the Garden concourse, said she was looking forward to studying the offense. She plays on the women’s basketball team at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn.
“I would assume it’s one person at the key, two people on the wings, and they keep rotating in a triangle every time they pass the ball,” she said. “Right?”
“It’s maybe three or four players that run consistently from the weak side to the strong side,” offered John Smith, 47, a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority who lives in Fort Greene in Brooklyn. “It’s so repetitive that the other team relaxes. So when those first three cuts don’t work, it’ll work the fourth time.”
Smith acknowledged: “It’s not a professional explanation. But ballplayers know what I’m talking about.”
Actually, a brief tutorial may be in order. The triangle was created by a college coach, Sam Barry, and innovated upon by Tex Winter, who had played for Barry at Southern California in the 1940s. The triangle is unusual because there are no set plays. Instead, it is predicated on reading and exposing soft spots in the defense.
The triangle — and there is an actual triangle formed by the post, wing and corner players on the strong side of the court — revolves around seven guiding principles that include maintaining proper spacing (about 15 to 20 feet between players), penetration by passing and the interchangeability of positions. Every player ought to be able to score, and from different angles.
When Jackson got his start in coaching with the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association in the 1980s, he was running a version of the flex offense — if only because he had yet to be exposed to the triangle. He learned about it from Winter when they were assistant coaches with the Bulls in 1987.
Broadway-Bound
The triangle has arrived in Manhattan, courtesy of Phil Jackson. Whether it might help the Knicks win their first championship in four decades remains to be seen, of course. But for now, New York fans will be getting a steady tutorial, learning to comprehend a system based on fluidity, precise spacing and continuous ball and player movement. Three players form the ever-changing triangles on the court, but all five players on offense are expected to contribute. When it works right, the points pile up and players are able to get back on defense. But it is not easy to master, so get ready to see some Knicks forgetting their lines.
THE DRESS REHEARSAL
As they prepared for their season opener, the Knicks held an open practice on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. Fans watched as the Knicks practiced the triangle, then practiced it some more.
ENTER DRIBBLING
Pass
Player movement
At one point in Sunday’s practice, the Knicks point guard Pablo Prigioni dribbled upcourt to form a triangle with two teammates — J.R. Smith, positioned in the corner, and Amar’e Stoudemire, with his back to the basket. Based on triangle precepts, Prigioni had the option to pass the ball to Smith or Stoudemire, or reverse the ball to the other side of the court, where a new triangle would be formed.
TRAVIS WARE
STOUDEMIRE
J.R. SMITH
JASON SMITH
PRIGIONI
PASS No. 1
In this instance, Prigioni opted to pass the ball to Stoudemire in the post. And that left Stoudemire with two basic options — take his defender to the basket or make a pass of his own.
JASON SMITH
STOUDEMIRE
J.R. SMITH
WARE
PRIGIONI
1
PASS No. 2
Stoudemire opted to pass the ball to Smith, who was making his own move to the hoop. Simple enough, but remember, this was just a practice. The real test for the Knicks’ triangle begins Wednesday night when the Chicago Bulls come to New York for the first game of the season.
JASON SMITH
STOUDEMIRE
J.R. SMITH
2
WARE
PRIGIONI
THE DRESS REHEARSAL
As they prepared for their season opener, the Knicks held an open practice on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. Fans watched as the Knicks practiced the triangle, then practiced it some more.
Pass
Player
movement
TRAVIS WARE
STOUDEMIRE
J.R. SMITH
JASON SMITH
PRIGIONI
ENTER DRIBBLING
At one point in Sunday’s practice, the Knicks point guard Pablo Prigioni dribbled upcourt to form a triangle with two teammates — J.R. Smith, positioned in the corner, and Amar’e Stoudemire, with his back to the basket. Based on triangle precepts, Prigioni had the option to pass the ball to Smith or Stoudemire, or reverse the ball to the other side of the court, where a new triangle would be formed.
JASON SMITH
STOUDEMIRE
J.R. SMITH
WARE
PRIGIONI
1
PASS No. 1
In this instance, Prigioni opted to pass the ball to Stoudemire in the post. And that left Stoudemire with two basic options — take his defender to the basket or make a pass of his own.
JASON SMITH
STOUDEMIRE
J.R. SMITH
2
WARE
PRIGIONI
PASS No. 2
Stoudemire opted to pass the ball to Smith, who was making his own move to the hoop. Simple enough, but remember, this was just a practice. The real test for the Knicks’ triangle begins Wednesday night when the Chicago Bulls come to New York for the first game of the season.
“I realized that this was the missing link I had been searching for in the C.B.A.,” Jackson wrote in his book “Sacred Hoops,” adding: “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.”
Charley Rosen, who was an assistant under Jackson in Albany, said he attempted to install the triangle when he became coach of the Patroons after Jackson’s departure. It was a bit of a disaster. Rosen had only a two-week window for training camp, far too little time to do it right, and his roster was in a state of flux.
“So I wound up calling triangular plays, different aspects of it, and it just didn’t work,” Rosen said. “After a few games, I tossed it out and put in something else. You have to study it, you have to play it, and you have to be it. You have to do the whole thing, and you can’t learn it from a book.”
Rosen was asked if there had been a moment when he first felt he had a solid grasp of the offense.
“It hasn’t happened yet,” he said.
Jose Calderon, the Knicks’ starting point guard this season, has run dozens of offenses in his career. Too many to count, he said, dating to his days playing professional basketball as a teenager in Spain. He was asked if the triangle was really all that distinct from other systems he had come across. Yes, he said, with one caveat: “It’s still basketball.”
He added: “Everybody asks about it. So you kind of explain that it’s about getting the proper spacing and moving the ball and reading the defense.”
Calderon was taking the easy way out by offering up digestible chunks for the masses. Consider that 228 pages were required for Winter to detail the triangle’s complexities in his book “The Triple-Post Offense,” which was published in 1962 and formed the foundation for his disciples.
The book has become a collector’s item. As of last week, the few copies that were available online were selling for nearly $200 apiece.
Some of the Knicks have grasped the offense’s nuances more easily than others this preseason. Travis Wear, a first-year forward from U.C.L.A., may have secured a spot on the roster by showcasing his versatility in the triangle, as a big man who can pass and shoot. He also got a head start by playing for the Knicks’ summer league team.
Like Calderon, Wear said the triangle still felt foreign to him. He is most familiar with offenses that are based on having defined plays — one player setting a screen for another player with the goal of creating space for a shot. Fairly straightforward stuff.
The triangle is fundamentally different because any player can touch the ball at any time, and each pass triggers another series of movements. Think of the triangle as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach to basketball, with an ever-expanding number of paths to the basket.
Learning the triangle is a process, Wear said — and that word, process, promises to be tethered to the new-look Knicks for the foreseeable future.
“I mean, even now, I still have questions about it,” Wear said. “I think we all still have questions. We know the basic actions, but we’ve only just scratched the surface.”
By his own admission, no player has had more questions than J. R. Smith, who might as well have been reclining in a psychiatrist’s office when he spoke with reporters last week. Smith had shot 1 of 11 from the field in a preseason game against the Toronto Raptors, and he sounded troubled, unsure of himself.
“Being the type of player I’ve been, it’s a struggle,” he said. “I’m not going to lie.”
Smith has never been particularly discriminating. He tends to shoot whenever he is open, and even when he is not. The triangle demands that he exercise more patience.
“We’ve had some conversations with J. R. and a number of our guys,” Fisher said. “It’s an instinctive game, and our players haven’t gotten to that point yet.”
The team’s offensive production was sporadic in the preseason, and that might be putting it mildly. The Knicks shot 42.2 percent from the field. But there were encouraging signs. For example, they assisted on 61.5 percent of their field goals, an improvement from last season, when their assist rate was 54.2 percent. It was an indication that the Knicks were less dependent on isolation plays (which often featured Carmelo Anthony last season) and more attuned to the sharing-is-caring philosophy at the core of the triangle.
Improved ball movement and fewer isolations could benefit Anthony, 30, who has absorbed his share of contact from defenders in recent seasons — and has a $124 million contract that runs through 2019. Rosen said he suspected that Anthony would face fewer double teams once the Knicks got a handle on the offense. It was Jackson, after all, who installed the triangle in Chicago as a way of protecting Jordan from the Detroit Pistons’ swarming defense.
Still, preseason opponents could sense that the Knicks are working through growing pains, a cautionary note to any other N.B.A. teams that might be thinking of trying Jackson’s approach. John Lucas III, a point guard who was recently released by the Washington Wizards, said the Knicks had been hesitant with some of their cuts and passes. Lucas has never run the triangle personally, but he knows it when he sees it — and the Knicks’ version of it had jagged edges when they played the Wizards at the Garden this month.
“Those old Lakers teams really had it going,” Lucas said. “It’s constant movement, and I think it’s probably tough for anybody to learn it if they’ve never done it before.”
The Knicks’ ongoing experiment promises to draw attention. Anthony acknowledged that he had conferred with Bryant, a close friend.
“We’ve talked here and there about the overall triangle, just to get his take on the triangle,” Anthony said. “But we haven’t really gone into full detail about what to expect from the triangle.”
Anthony said he was likely to hear more from Bryant as the season wore on. It is worth pointing out that the Knicks have no interest in employing Bryant, now in his 19th season with the Lakers, as a triangle consultant. His work will be pro bono.
“I’m pretty sure he’ll be reaching out and saying, ‘O.K., I see this and I see that,’ ” Anthony said.
If it was not already apparent, the triangle has returned as the most famous shape in basketball. Everyone will be watching.