Part 7 (1/2)

I've always felt that there is a strong connection between music and basketball. The game is inherently rhythmic in nature and requires the same kind of selfless, nonverbal communication you find in the best jazz combos. Once when John Coltrane was playing in Miles Davis's band, he went off on an interminably long solo that made Miles furious. ”What the f.u.c.k?” Miles shouted.

”My axe just wouldn't stop, brother,” Coltrane replied. ”It just kept on going.”

”Well, then, put the motherf.u.c.ker down.”

Steve Lacy, who played with Thelonious Monk, set down a list of Monk's advice for the members of his combo. Here's a selection:

Just because you're not a drummer, doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

Stop playing all those weird notes (that bulls.h.i.+t), play the melody!

Make the drummer sound good.

Don't play the piano part, I'm playing that.

Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by ... What you don't play can be more important than what you do.

When you're swinging, swing some more.

Whatever you think can't be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

You've got to dig it to dig it, you dig?

What I love about Monk's list is his basic message about the importance of awareness, collaboration, and having clearly defined roles, which apply as much to basketball as they do to jazz. I discovered early that the best way to get players to coordinate their actions was to have them play the game in 4/4 time. The basic rule was that the player with the ball had to do something with it before the third beat: either pa.s.s, shoot, or start to dribble. When everyone is keeping time, it makes it easier to harmonize with one another, beat by beat.

The man who understood this better than anyone was Tex Winter, the other great basketball mind on the Bulls staff. Tex, an expert in free-flowing Western-style basketball, is best known for his work with the triangle offense-or triple-post offense, as he called it-which he learned playing for Coach Sam Barry at the University of Southern California. Although he didn't invent the triangle offense, Tex expanded it with several key innovations, including creating a sequence of pa.s.ses that led to coordinated movement among the players. Tex was also a gifted teacher who designed his own drills to make the players proficient in the basic actions.

When Tex was twenty-nine years old, he landed the top job at Marquette and became the youngest ever head coach of a Division I college. Two years later he took over the men's program at Kansas State, implemented the offense, and transformed the Wildcats into an NCAA tournament regular. During that period, Jerry Krause, then a scout, befriended Tex and spent a lot of time in Manhattan, Kansas, learning basketball strategy from him. At one point Jerry told Tex that if he ever became general manager of an NBA franchise, Tex would be his first hire. Tex didn't think anything of it at the time. Then, years later, when he was coaching at LSU, he saw a news story on ESPN about Krause being named GM of the Bulls and said to his wife, Nancy, that the next phone call he got would be from Jerry. He was right.

Ever since I started coaching in the CBA, I'd been looking for a system of offense that approximated the selfless ball movement we'd used with the champions.h.i.+p Knicks. I played around with the flex system-a fast-moving, flowing offense popular in Argentina and Europe-but it was limited. I didn't like the way the players had to s.p.a.ce themselves in relation to one another and there was no way to disrupt the offense and do something else, if the situation demanded it. In contrast, the triangle not only required a high level of selflessness, but was also flexible enough to allow players a great deal of individual creativity. That suited me perfectly.

The triangle gets its name from one of its key features-a sideline triangle formed by three players on the ”strong” side of the floor. But I prefer to think of the triangle as ”five-man tai chi” because it involves all the players moving together in response to the way the defense positions itself. The idea is not to go head to head against the defense but to read what the defense is doing and respond accordingly. For instance, if the defense swarms Michael Jordan on one side of the floor, that opens up a series of options for the other four players. But they all need to be acutely aware of what's happening and be coordinated enough to move together in unison so they can take advantage of the openings the defense offers. That's where the music comes in.

When everyone is moving in harmony, it's virtually impossible to stop them. One of the biggest converts to the triangle-eventually-was Kobe Bryant, who loved the unpredictability of the system. ”Our teams were hard to play against,” Kobe says, ”because the opposition didn't know what we were going to do. Why? Because we didn't know what we were going to do from moment to moment. Everybody was reading and reacting to each other. It was a great orchestra.”

There are all kinds of misconceptions about the triangle. Some critics believe that you need to have players of Michael and Kobe's caliber to make it work. Actually, the reverse is true. The triangle wasn't designed for the superstars, who will find ways to score no matter what system you use, but for all the other players on the team who aren't capable of creating their own shots. It also gives every player a vital role in the offense, whether they end up shooting or not.

Another misconception is that the triangle is far too complicated for most players to learn. In fact, once you master the fundamentals, it's far easier to learn the triangle than the more complex offenses prevalent today. The main thing you need to know is how to pa.s.s the ball and read defenses accurately. At one time most players learned these skills in high school or college, but that's not true with many of the young players coming into the NBA now. As a result, we had to spend a lot of time teaching them how to play the game, starting with the most basic skills, from dribbling with control to footwork and pa.s.sing.

Tex was a master at this. He had developed a whole series of drills to teach players how to execute fundamentals. He trained them to create the right amount of s.p.a.cing between one another on the floor and to coordinate their movements according to a basic set of rules. As far as Tex was concerned, the genius was in the details, and it didn't matter whether you were Michael Jordan or the lowest rookie on the team; Tex would badger you until you got it right.

Every year Tex, who loved inspirational sayings, would recite to the team his favorite proverb about the importance of learning the details:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.