Flathead Lake, Montana
Spitting out cherry pits with Phil Jackson
The 1996 Birmingham Bullets. Birmingham is where I won my first title since the high school championship in Iowa.
(Nurse family collection)
Phil Jackson referred to his offensive system as “a series of complex, coordinated moves, depending on how the defense responds.” He also called it “five-man tai chi.”
The offense I helped install as a Raptors assistant, and what I run as head coach, has evolved beyond the triangle that Jackson and Tex Winter made famous. The game has changed, the officiating has changed (you can no longer put your hands on a ball handler on the perimeter), and I’ve broken up the triangle to create more dribble drives into the lane and kick-out passes to three-point shooters.
I have referred to it as the Monk Offense—a reference to the legendary jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. (In truth, I borrowed the term. I first heard it from veteran coach and offensive innovator Ron Ekker.)
Great jazz has a structure beneath it and the artists are deeply grounded in its fundamentals. But there’s also a freedom and spontaneity. The musicians step forward and create, and the great ones innovate. That’s how I see basketball. Free-flowing and seemingly random—but with everyone versed in the underlying system. It only works if we’re all speaking the same language.
This is a good place to write a little about my relationship to music. If you walk into my office, you see the connections right away. On the walls are pictures of Monk, Muddy Waters, BB King, and Chet Baker.
When I was little, my mother made me take piano lessons. Her side of the family was musically talented, and some of them had studied music and taught it. But like a lot of children put into music instruction—and probably like 90 percent of the ones obsessed with sports who wanted to be outside all the time—I absolutely hated it.
I took my lessons from a nun who taught at our school. I think the only time I ever really played was when she was trying to teach me, which went on from about fourth through sixth grade before I was allowed to quit.
I did learn to read music, at least minimally, and in high school I started playing around with music again, on my own. I’d try to play “Purple Rain,” or whatever else I might be listening to, and it would take me at least three months to get it to where it sounded a little like something that a person listening to it might recognize as the same song.
Years later, when I got back from England, and in the months before I started coaching the Iowa Energy, I figured I had some time on my hands, so I should do a little self-improvement. I started taking classes at the Harvard Extension School, and one that I signed up for was called the History of the Blues in America. It was taught by a professor named Charlie Sawyer, who had traveled with BB King and written a biography of him.
The class went up online on a Tuesday night, and I’d sometimes participate live if I could, or I’d get up first thing Wednesday morning and link in. I looked forward to it because it was basically a two-hour jam session. He brought in artists and they would play a little—and then it would go back and forth between their jamming and Charlie interviewing them.
If you wanted an A in the class you needed to do some kind of final project, and I asked, “What if I learn to play some blues on the piano and at the end of the semester, I’ll send in a three-minute cut of what I’ve got?”
That got approved and I bought a cool piano in Des Moines that I found on Craigslist for $900. I got a teacher who supposedly specialized in the blues, though he wasn’t great. I was trying to read notes and I felt like a fourth grader again. It was hard, but I was working my ass off at it because I had this project I needed to complete.
Charlie and I struck up a friendship. Toward the end of the semester I told Charlie I wanted to attend one of the on-campus classes in Cambridge, and he suggested I come to the last one, which was a big jam session with four bands at the student union building. While I was there, I told him I wanted to continue learning the piano, and he set me up with David Maxwell, who has since passed away but was one of the great blues pianists of all time. He played with Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and many others.
I got a lesson from Maxwell in Boston. He would play something and show me what he was doing with his hands, and then I’d try to do it. I couldn’t really replicate the sounds he was making, but it was one of the great learning experiences of my life, and it got me excited about what was possible if I threw myself into it.
When I was in school, all the way through college, I was never as good a student as I could have been. I was clever enough to get decent grades without a full effort, but I never really invested in learning for learning’s sake. I was one of those people for whom the saying “education is wasted on the young” definitely applied, but I’ve tried to make up for it ever since.
I have a piano that I play in my Raptors office. When the team is on the road, I travel with a portable keyboard and always find time to play. My ability level is probably around the equivalent of having a 12 handicap in golf; I’m far from a professional, but not bad for an amateur.
It’s calming for me, almost like meditation. I don’t think about basketball when I’m playing music, but I’m pretty sure it helps free the creative part of my brain.
And it also helps give me another frame for thinking about what I face during the season with the unpredictability of trades and injuries. With new guys coming in with some regularity, and other players having to shift positions, it’s helpful to think of myself as leading a permanent jam session. Just have to make sure everybody who sits in knows the tunes, and as the band leader, I do what I can to get them comfortable.
* * *
My reaction to getting named head coach of the Raptors was not that I had earned it because I was super smart and knew everything it would take to succeed, but that I better hurry up and learn more. That’s my mode—stave off whatever anxiety or insecurity I might have by trying to cram in more knowledge and wisdom.
I set off on a little tour of America, stopping in on old mentors as well as some coaches whom I respected but had never met. One of my destinations was Traverse City, Michigan, to see Eldon Miller, my coach at Northern Iowa. (He came in to replace my first coach there, the one who decided in the middle of the season that he’d had enough.)
Coach is still sharp, but he does not hear well, especially in his right ear. He picked me up at the airport and we drove to his place, which was about forty-five minutes away. I was on his right side, in the passenger seat, so it was not easy to communicate.
About halfway there, he turns to me and says, in a very loud voice, “You want to know what it’s all about?”
That was his opening statement, since before that there was no conversation going on. I said, “Sure, Coach, I definitely want to know. What’s it about?”
And he said, even louder this time, “Playing to win without fear! That’s what it’s all about. Playing without fear!”
That resonated with me right away because it fit our situation in Toronto. We played fearless, confident basketball during the season—three straight seasons with more than fifty wins—and then as soon as the playoffs started, we lost our swagger. We played with fear, and every time we caught a bad break or lost a close game, it got worse.
When fans look at players, I think they tend to focus on what looks like their immense power and confidence. It’s understandable. They’re built like Greek gods and they’re famous and rich. You figure they have the world by the tail and imagine that if you were in their place, you’d never have a bad day.
But a lot of players have fears. They fear losing. They fear not living up to their contracts. They fear playing poorly and letting the team down. They do not want to be the one with the ball in their hands at the end of a game because someone else is a better shooter. Well, guess what? If you end up with the ball and it’s a shot you can make, you’ve got to let it fly. If you don’t, you’re strangling the whole team with your anxiety. You’re spreading it.
As a coach, you can’t deny those fears exist. Players put themselves in boxes because of fear and limit their own possibilities. This became something we talked about from training camp on, and I made it into an acronym—FEAR, which stood for Face Everything And Rise. It was a way of saying that we acknowledge our fears but we’re going to look at them head-on and defeat them.
The FEAR slogan sort of fit me and my personality. I had failed at various points in my career, but I don’t think it was ever out of some fear I couldn’t face. I left home and went off to coach older guys in England. I started a D-League team from scratch in Des Moines. When I moved on to the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, and they asked me to do all this experimental stuff, I wasn’t afraid to try it.
That had to be my attitude as I started off coaching my first NBA team—that basically, I’m going for it, man. Every single day. After working so hard to get an opportunity, I couldn’t approach it as something I was afraid to lose. I couldn’t start playing it safe.
* * *
The Raptors director of sports science, Alex McKechnie, is a distinguished-looking man—gray hair, cool black-framed glasses—who goes by the nickname Silver. He is an integral part of everything we do and was the person in the organization responsible for shaping how we would help restore Kawhi Leonard to good health when he came to us in 2018 after being injured almost the entire previous season. (More on that later.)
Alex spent five years with Phil Jackson in Los Angeles. On the day I got the job, he came into my office and said, “I’m going to set you up with Phil.” A few days later, he texted us both and said, “You guys sort it out.”
At that point, I was just Nick from the D-League and Phil Jackson was the man with thirteen NBA championships—the two he won playing for Red Holzman’s legendary New York Knicks teams, the six he won with Michael Jordan and the Bulls, and the five he added on with Shaq, Kobe, and the Lakers.
But other than the small matter of his thirteen rings and Hall of Fame status, we did have a few things in common. We were both Midwesterners who had played college basketball at schools no one much cared about—me at Northern Iowa and Phil about 580 miles north, at the University of North Dakota. And despite the fact that he had a significant playing career in the NBA—a dozen seasons between 1967 and 1980—he had to fight his way into coaching in the league just like I did.
Phil was an assistant coach with the NBA’s New York Nets for a couple of years after his playing career, and then between 1982 and 1987, he coached the Albany Patroons of the old Continental Basketball Association. (He jokingly referred to the CBA as the Cockroach Basketball Association.) For four summers, he coached teams in Puerto Rico, in what was known as the Superior Basketball League—a job that he has written taught him valuable lessons in “how to cope with chaos.” (The fans were so rowdy that the courts were encircled with wire fencing.)
He could not get a job in the NBA. All of the out-of-the-box thinking he was later celebrated for was considered a little too out there for the people making the hiring decisions.
NBA players back in his day made only a fraction of what they do now, even adjusted for inflation. He would not have emerged from his playing career as a wealthy man. He even considered going to law school at one point and may have made the leap if Bulls general manager Jerry Krause had not offered him an assistant coaching job in 1987.
I can relate to that. At one low point in my time in England, I thought, maybe I’ll just pack up and go home. I got as far as making a list of three or four other things I might want to do. Unfortunately, when I looked at the options I put down, they all looked like absolute shit to me.
I suppose that’s when I confronted the fact that I was a lifelong coach. A basketball lifer.
And I decided at that moment, just get off your ass, man. Try to compete harder. Fight like hell. Try to learn more. Let’s read some more sports psychology books and figure out how to reach these guys another way. Let’s study winning. Let’s look at more tape of out-of-bounds plays so I can steal a couple more wins somewhere.
I think this current generation thinks sometimes that getting ahead is all about making contacts—write this guy an email, try to bump into this other guy at a camp or in a hotel lobby. And I’m not saying that’s not important. If I knew more people, things would have happened faster for me.
But you can’t skip the step of working your ass off and learning your craft. If you get the job you’re dreaming about, that’s great, but do you know how to do it? Did you really get yourself ready, or did all your energy just go into figuring out how to climb the ladder?
* * *
Phil got back to me quickly after Alex put us together and asked me to fly out to talk with him where he lived, in Flathead Lake, Montana. He was in his early seventies and retired, having left his last NBA job, president of the New York Knicks, about a year before.
I flew to Glacier Park International Airport and made my way to a motel I had reserved in Flathead Lake without knowing how long Phil wanted to give me. An hour, a lunch, a day? I had no idea.
When I called to say I’d landed, he gave me directions to his local coffee shop. I had a semi-formal list of things I wanted to ask him about, but a conversation with him does not go in a straight line. We talked for a couple of hours, just circling around things about his life—him asking me about my life and career, different basketball people we both knew—and then after a while, he said, “Let’s go, man.”
We jumped in his truck and drove maybe a quarter of a mile before he stopped at this farm stand—it was cherry season there—and he bought this big-ass bag and plopped it down between us and rolled the windows down. And for the next two and a half hours, we proceeded to drive around the lake eating cherries.
And I’m there thinking, here I am, sitting with a guy I’ve studied for all these years—his coaching moves, time-outs, end-of-game strategies, the triangle—and I’m rolling around with him and spitting cherry pits out the window of his truck.
He finally dropped me back at my rental car and said, “Go shower up or do whatever you’ve got to do. Dinner’s at seven-thirty,” and told me where to meet him. We had dinner, then drove back to his place and sat on his deck, in these rocking chairs, until about eleven-thirty, and as I was leaving, he said, “Text me when you’re up.”
The next morning, I met him at the end of a long gravel road, and he was sitting there in one of those four-wheelers, an all-terrain vehicle, and I jumped in and he drove me out to this other cabin that he owns. It was right on the lake, and we talked on the deck for a couple of hours, grabbed some lunch, and when we came back, he said, “Let’s go down to the basement.”
He said somebody had just sent him some video of the Bulls championship runs—he hadn’t looked at it yet—and we just sat down there for a couple of hours, half watching it and just bullshitting about basketball, his strategies back then, how the game has changed, where he thinks it’s going.
We got through the tapes and he said, “I’ll meet you again for dinner at the Italian place.” He was incredibly generous with his time. It ended up being a three-day visit, and it was helpful in getting my mind right for what was in front of me.
We didn’t talk much about the triangle offense. And besides, it would be a huge waste to get time with Phil and use it to just geek out on nuts-and-bolts basketball.
I’d ask him a question and he would circle the house for an hour before he got to an answer—but everything in between was well worth the time.
As a lot of people know, Phil is spiritual. He grew up in a strict Pentecostal household—his dad was a minister—and as an adult he has been attracted to Eastern faiths and Native American religious practices. (His best-known book is Sacred Hoops.) He wrote that the team area of the Bulls’ training site was where “the spirit of the team takes form” and was a “holy sanctuary. The place where the players and the coaches come together and prepare our hearts and minds for battle.”
In the time I spent with him in Montana, Phil, true to form, often mixed earthly basketball wisdom with something akin to spiritual guidance. What I took as his message was that lots of stuff was in my control as a coach, but that if I did not handle things correctly, heavenly forces would make sure I paid a price.
He cautioned me that I always had to put the needs of the group first—before myself or any individual. “First and foremost, don’t underestimate the basketball gods,” he said as we sat out on his deck one of those evenings. “What do I mean by that? Here’s what I mean. You’ve been hired to make every decision that’s best for the team. If you don’t do that, you’re going to run into some godly problems.”
Another thing that he left me with was his advice on my interactions with players. There were times I’d need to be tough and raise my voice—and others when I’d have to be more like a gentle parent.
“I want you to imagine you got a sword in your hand,” he said. “You have one end that’s really sharp. You’re going to need to use that to prod them and get on their asses and motivate them and push them further. But every now and then, I want you to look at the handle of the sword. And that’s going to represent compassion. You’re going to have to understand where they’ve come from and what they’re going through at the moment.”
* * *
All successful coaches know what methods work for them. I couldn’t set out to be a copy of Phil Jackson or anyone else. I wanted to pick up what I could to adapt for myself.
Coaching a professional team always entails teaching some complex tactics. A normal fan, or even players at lower levels of basketball, are not going to fully grasp what we try to do on offense or defense. (I’ve got players who sometimes don’t!)
When I visited with Joe Maddon, who was then managing the Chicago Cubs, he stressed the value of communicating a small set of broad principles that you want your team to follow. Those are more important than game tactics. He set out his principles at the beginning of each season—often on slogans that ended up on T-shirts.
“Embrace the Target,” was one, meaning understand what it means to be a championship favorite, and therefore, a target of other teams. “Respect 90” meant go all out on the ninety feet between bases. “Try Not to Suck” was self-explanatory.
Big corporations do a version of the same thing. Amazon probably has some of the most complicated engineering challenges of any company in the world, but a single phrase of its CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, guides everything they do: “The customer is the most important person in the room.”
Apple drills into its employees the mantra “Think different.”
These corporations deal with stuff a lot more involved than any basketball team ever would, but they still see value in simplifying their missions to as few words as possible.
I also got a chance to visit with Pete Carroll, the football coach, whom I’ve long admired. I watched his Seattle Seahawks practice, which was the best I’ve ever witnessed in any sport at any level.
Carroll has written that after he was fired as head coach of the New England Patriots in 2000 (his successor was Bill Belichick), he decided to write down his principles of coaching. What he stood for. How he wanted his teams to play.
He had been a head coach with two NFL franchises at that point and a defensive coordinator with both college and pro teams. In Win Forever, he wrote, “I couldn’t believe that I had been coaching for the past twenty-six years and had never stated my philosophy, let alone written it down.”
Carroll was inspired by John Wooden’s famous “pyramid of success.”
By the time training camp rolled around in September 2018, I had my own pyramid, which I had made into a slide and showed the players in our first meeting.
On it were some of the specific features of how we wanted to play. Assisted buckets was a reminder that we wanted to share the ball on offense. Shot spectrum meant take our shots from the high-percentage areas on the floor. Ball pressure and shot contests were part of how we wanted to play defense.
There were a number of sayings on the pyramid, or platitudes if you want to be critical about it. “Expect to Win” was one of them, borrowed from my time in Birmingham, England. “Attack the Title.” “Let It Rip.” “Only the Fearless Can Be Great.”
None of the stuff I put up there was complicated. None of it was brilliant. But it was concise and clear, and it stated the principles of how we wanted to play—and, more important, the spirit of how we would compete.
* * *