The Bulls' offensive weapon of choice
Triumph of the Triangle
By Marty Burns

BY NOW IT SHOULD BE THE LATEST RAGE, bigger even than the macarena. Every Armani-clad coach from John Calipari to Darrell Walker should be studying it letter by letter. Every player should be practicing his "ping passes" and "pinch posts." Every fan should be dusting off his high school geometry textbooks.

We're talking, of course, about the Chicago Bulls' much-acclaimed triangle offense, the fast-moving, quick-passing, geometric-sounding system that the Bulls have employed in winning four NBA championships in the past six seasons. Even those skeptics who wondered during Chicago's three-peat years whether the Bulls really needed any offense other than 'get the ball to Michael Jordan' must have been convinced after last season's record-setting 72-10 campaign, in which Chicago led the league in scoring (105.2 points per game) while committing the fourth-fewest turnovers (14.3 per game). The triangle offense? Might as well call it the Bermuda Triangle for those who have to play against it.
      Yet despite its obvious success, few NBA coaches have been willing to copy the system. Even in a league where imitation has long been the surest form of job security, few have tried. "I'm surprised more people don't run it," say Knicks assistant coach Brendan Malone, the former Pistons assistant and Raptors coach who is considered reigning guru on defending the Bulls. "Usually people in sports emulate success. When Bobby Knight won the college title in 1976, everybody started to use the motion offense he used. But you don't see many teams running the triple post."
      The triple post - or sideline triangle, as the Bulls prefer to call it - is hardly a secret. It has been around in various forms since at least the 1940s, when then USC coach Sam Barry ran a version of it with a stocky guard named Fred (Tex) Winter. Winter, now 74 years old and a Bulls assistant coach, used the offense when he became coach at Kansas State, where he won eight Big Eight championships from 1953 to 1967. After several more coaching stops and two brief retirements, Winter moved to the Bulls in 1985 and continued to refine the offense until Phil Jackson took over in 1989 and installed it full time.
      The triangle offense is unique in that it utilizes constant passing and cutting rather than set plays or isolation plays. It enables a team to spread its offense extremely wide, and it demands from its players pinpoint passing, constant ball movement, good hard cuts and keen alertness. "It doesn't rely on the post-up game like every other offense in the league does," says Hall of Fame coach Chuck Daly. "It's a solid basketball offense, and when run properly, it's one of the most beautiful offenses to watch."
      To Bulls' coaches, of course, the beauty of the triangle offense is that any player can assume any position at any time, making it especially difficult to defend against. Once the Bulls form the basic triangle, they can run a series of "options" or "counters"- backdoors, weakside pinches, lobs into the post -depending on what the defense gives them: the triangle offense creates opportunities for all these and more. With such versatile, multidimensional players as Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Toni Kukoc and Dennis Rodman, the Bulls are able to exploit mismatches all over the court. "One great thing about the offense is that it gives everybody their touches and makes them feel involved," says TNT analyst and former NBA coach Dick Versace. "Another thing is that it's unpredictable. You don't just come down and hold two fingers up and call a play, so the defense never knows for sure what's coming."
      With strengths like these, it's no surprise this offense has many admirers. Daly liked it so much, he used it briefly in the early '90s with the Pistons, a classic pick-and-roll team if ever there was one. More recently the triangle was adopted by the University of Connecticut women's basketball team, which went 35-0 and won a national title in 1995. "It's a fun offense to run because on every possession, every player on the floor is a threat to score," says Huskies Coach Geno Auriemma, who learned about the offense by watching tapes of Bulls games and later sent away for Winter's book on the triple post. "In many ways it's ideally suited to the women's game."
 

Many had assumed that Mavericks Coach Jim Cleamons, a Bulls assistant from 1989 to 1996, would implement the triangle in Dallas this past season. "But if [Cleamons] does decide to use the triangle, I don't think he'll call it that - not after what happened there before," said Winter. What happened was that Dallas coach Quinn Buckner installed the triangle when he took over the Mavericks in 1993-94, but he was fired after a dismal 13-69 season. Indeed, Cleamons has already gone on record as saying he won't run the triangle. "Guys here are paranoid," he explains. "They had an experience with it a few years ago that didn't work. I think they would freeze rather than be comfortable with it."
      And so the question remains: Why don't more NBA teams use the triangle offense? Many answers have been offered:
      You need Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. Skeptics argue that the real reason the triangle works so well for the Bulls is that they have two of the game's best one-on-one players. Put Jordan and Pippen in any offensive system, they contend, and Chicago would still have four Larry O'Brien trophies. "The reason it works is very simple: Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen," says former Bulls and now Warriors guard B.J. Armstrong. "Without those two players you can't have those so-called interchangeable parts that make the offense so effective...Think about it: when it's under 10 seconds on the shot clock, everybody knows where the ball's going. Yet how many times have you seen Michael or Scottie bail them out?"
      Winter doesn't dispute that the system works better with the all-encompassing talents of a Jordan, but he points out correctly that the 1993-94 Bulls won 55 games without the services of No. 23, who had retired to play minor league baseball. That season the Pippen-led bulls continued to put on nightly basketball clinics, with crisp passing and ball movement right out of some old Harlem Globetrotters clip. "It's always the execution that counts," Winter says. "The better players you have, the more effective you're going to be. But it's still a good offense."
      It's too complicated. Perhaps the biggest misconception about the Bulls' triangle offense is that it's difficult to learn. "It's actually very easy," say Armstrong. "In the triangle offense there are no set plays. You just watch the defense and let the ball dictate where you go."
      The offense does contain some strange nomenclature, like ping passes (Winter's term for quick passes with no windup or telegraphing) and pinch posts (plays in which the guard at the top of the key passes to the weakside forward and, depending on how the defense reacts, cuts inside or outside of him, holds his position or drops back), but otherwise it's just basic
basketball.
   Winter admits that the triangle does require teaching time so players can learn the proper reads and get comfortable with its nuances, but he says most coaches simply don't want to change. "Coaches like to teach what they know," Winter says. "And most of them know the pro-style game because they played pro ball."
      It takes too long to implement. With pressure from owners and fans to win immediately, few NBA coaches are willing to risk losing their jobs while waiting for their players to learn a new system. Buckner, for example, was fired by the Mavs after just one season, before he could sell his team on the triangle. "I loved the offense," says Buckner, now an analyst for CBS. "We just didn't have enough time to get the right personnel in there."
      Compounding the problem is an NBA schedule that militates against radical system changes. "Training camps start October 1, and seven days later you're facing your first exhibition game," Daly says. "When do you have time to teach a new offense?'
      The players won't accept it. One of the necessities of the triangle is that players must be willing to buy into the system. This means not only that a star might get fewer shots, but also that he might be taking those shots from unfamiliar spots. "It requires guys to change their mind-set on the court,' Buckner says. "If you're used to posting up all the time and now suddenly you're out on the wing, you might not be that comfortable with it at first."
      Winter agrees that all players must be committed to the offense for it to succeed. As proof he points to the selling job Jackson had to perform on Jordan when the Bulls' star initially balked at the offense. "Phil convinced Michael that if we were going to win championships, we had to have an offense that involved all five players," says Winter. "It's to Michael's credit that he accepted it. He had to make some sacrifices, no question about it, yet he has still led the league in scoring every year."
      Coaches just don't like it. Some NBA coaches would rather blow-dry their hair with a flame-thrower than copy another's system. "I think everybody in the NBA wants their won style," say Nets forward Jayson Williams. "Coaches can have egos as big as players'. They want their system. They don't want to just take someone else's."
      For now, the triangle offense in the NBA is likely to remain exclusively a Chicago phenomenon. Just consider it another element of the Bulls' mystique. And as former Celtics Coach Carr puts it, "The way Chicago runs that offense, some teams might not try it just because they don't want to look bad by comparison."

01 En coulisse

02 Pom-pom girls

03 Initiatives communautaires

04 Histoire du basket professionnel à Chicago

05 Johnny LIGMANOWSKI, responsable de l'équipement

06 Tex WINTER, maître tactique & créateur de l'attaque en triangle

07 Ivica DUKAN, découvreur de talent dans le monde entier

08 Ray CLAY, annonceur officiel du United Center

09 Ce qui fait revenir les fans des Bulls

10 Histoire des Bulls de Chicago

11 10 plus beaux tirs des Bulls

12 Top 10 de l'histoire des Bulls

13 Bagues de champions NBA

15 Triangle offensif

16 IMAGES

17 ENTRAINEMENT

18 JORDAN part !

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