One finger can’t lift a pebble.
—HOPI SAYING
The Bulls’ owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, once told me he thought most people were motivated by one of two forces: fear or greed. That may be true, but I also think people are motivated by love. Whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not, what drives most basketball players is not the money or the adulation, but their love of the game. They live for those moments when they can lose themselves completely in the action and experience the pure joy of competition.
One of the main jobs of a coach is to reawaken that spirit so that the players can blend together effortlessly. It’s often an uphill fight. The ego-driven culture of basketball, and society in general, militates against cultivating this kind of selfless action, even for members of a team whose success as individuals is tied directly to the group performance. Our society places such a high premium on individual achievement, it’s easy for players to get blinded by their own self-importance and lose a sense of interconnectedness, the essence of teamwork.
When I arrived in Chicago to join the Bulls’ coaching staff, I felt as if I was setting out on a strange and wonderful adventure. No longer hampered by the responsibilities of being a head coach, I was free to become a student of the game again and explore a wide range of new ideas.
The Bulls were in a state of transition. Ever since he had taken over as vice president of basketball operations in 1985, Jerry Krause had been feverishly rearranging the lineup, trying to find the right combination of players to complement Michael Jordan. A former NBA scout, Krause had been nicknamed “the Sleuth” because of his passionate desire to scout a game incognito, but he has an uncanny ability to find extraordinary prospects at small, out-of-the-way colleges where nobody else had bothered to look. Among the many stars he had drafted were Earl Monroe, Wes Unseld, Alvan Adams, Jerry Sloan, and Norm Van Lier. In his first two years running the Bulls, he had drafted power forward Charles Oakley, who would later be traded to New York for center Bill Cartwright, and acquired point guard John Paxson, a tough-minded clutch performer who would play a major role in the Bulls’ drive for the championship. Krause’s biggest coup, however, was landing Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant in the 1987 draft.
Scottie’s rise to the NBA read like a fairy tale. The youngest of eleven children, he grew up in Hamburg, Arkansas, a sleepy rural town where his father worked in a paper mill. When Scottie was a teenager, his father was incapacitated by a stroke, and the family had to get by on his disability payments. Scottie was a respectable point guard in high school, but at only 6'1" he didn’t impress the college recruiters. But his coach believed in him and talked the athletic director at University of Central Arkansas into giving him an educational grant and a job as the basketball team’s equipment manager. In his sophomore year, Scottie grew four inches and began to excel, and by his senior year had become a dynamic end-to-end player, averaging 26.3 points and 10 rebounds a game. Krause picked up on him early and tried to keep it a secret. But after Scottie excelled in a series of predraft tryout games, Krause knew he would be one of the top five prospects. So he worked out a deal to flip-flop picks with Seattle in order to acquire Scottie’s draft rights.
Scottie, the fifth pick overall, was the kind of athlete Krause loves. He had long arms and big hands, and the speed and leaping ability to become a first-class all-around player. What impressed me about him was his natural aptitude for the game. Scottie had a near-genius basketball IQ: he read the court extremely well, knew how to make complicated adjustments on the run and, like Jordan, seemed to have a sixth sense about what was going to happen next. In practice Scottie gravitated toward Michael, eager to see what he could learn from him. While other young players shied away from covering Michael in scrimmages to avoid being humiliated, Scottie wasn’t afraid to take him on, and often did a credible job guarding him.
Horace, the tenth pick overall, also came from a rural Southern town—Sparta, Georgia—but that’s where his similarity to Pippen ended. Unlike Scottie, Horace, a 6'10" power forward, took a long time learning the intricacies of the game. He had trouble concentrating at first, and often had to make up for mental lapses with his quickness and sheer athleticism. This made him vulnerable against teams like the Detroit Pistons, who devised subtle plays that took advantage of his defensive mistakes.
Horace has an identical twin brother, Harvey, who plays for the Portland Trail Blazers. They were close growing up—so close, in fact, they claimed to have had virtually identical dreams. But their rivalry became so intense playing basketball at Clemson that Harvey decided to transfer to another school. Horace and Scottie became best friends during their rookie year, and we nicknamed them Frick and Frack because they dressed alike, drove the same model car and were rarely seen apart. As a twin, Horace expected everyone on the team to be treated equally, and later criticized management publicly for giving Jordan preferential treatment. Everyone liked Horace because he was guileless and unassuming, and had a generous heart. A devout born-again Christian, he was once so moved by the professed faith of a homeless man he met in front of a church in Philadelphia that he put him up in a hotel and gave him several hundred dollars in spending money.
The Bulls’ head coach, Doug Collins, was an energetic leader brimming with ideas who worked well with young players like Horace and Scottie. Doug was a popular sports figure in Illinois. The first Illinois State player to be named an All-American, he scored what should have been the winning foul shots in the controversial final of the 1972 Olympics, before the clock was set back and the Soviet Union snatched the win in the closing seconds. A great outside shooter, Collins was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers, the number one pick overall, and made the All-Star team four years in a row before being slowed down by injuries. Having played alongside Julius (Dr. J) Erving, the Picasso of the slam dunk, Collins had enormous respect for what Jordan could do with the ball and was reluctant to try anything that might inhibit his creative process.
Though Collins’ coaching experience was limited, he had a sharp analytical mind, and Krause hoped that, with guidance from his veteran assistants, Tex Winter and Johnny Bach, he could solve the Michael Jordan problem. This was not an easy assignment. Jordan was just coming into his own as the best all-around player in the game. The year before I arrived—Collins’ first season as head coach—Jordan had averaged 37.1 points a game to win his first of seven straight scoring titles, while also becoming the first player to make 200 steals and 100 blocked shots in a season. Jordan could do things with a basketball nobody had ever seen before: he seemed to defy gravity when he went up for a shot, hanging in the air for days—sometimes weeks—as he crafted his next masterpiece. Was it merely an illusion? It didn’t matter. Whenever he touched the ball, everyone in the stadium became transfixed, wondering what he was going to do next.
The problem was that Jordan’s teammates were often just as enchanted as the fans. Collins devised dozens of plays to get the rest of the team involved in the action; in fact, he had so many he was given the name Play-a-Day Collins. That helped, but when push came to shove, the other players usually faded into the background and waited for Michael to perform another miracle. Unfortunately, this mode of attack, which assistant coach Johnny Bach dubbed “the archangel offense,” was so one-dimensional the better defensive teams had little difficulty shutting it down. Our nemesis, the Detroit Pistons, came up with an effective scheme called the Jordan Rules, which involved having three or more players switch off and close in on Michael whenever he made a move to the hoop. They could get away with it because none of the other Bulls posed much of a scoring threat.
How to open up the offense and make the other players more productive was a constant topic of conversation. Early on, I told the coaching staff about Red Holzman’s axiom that the sign of a great player was not how much he scored, but how much he lifted his teammates’ performance. Collins said excitedly, “You’ve got to tell that to Michael.” I hesitated. “No, you’ve got to tell him right now,” Collins insisted. So I searched the gym and found Michael in the weight room chatting with the players. Slightly embarrassed, I repeated Holzman’s adage, saying “Doug thought you’d like hear this.” I expected Michael, who could be sarcastic, to dismiss the remark as a product of basketball’s stone age. But instead he thanked me and was genuinely curious about my experience with the championship Knicks.
The following season, 1988–89, Collins moved Jordan over to point guard in midseason and made Craig Hodges, one of the league’s best three-point shooters, the shooting guard. The point guard’s primary job is to move the ball upcourt and direct the offense. In that position Michael would have to focus more attention on creating scoring opportunities for his teammates. The switch worked pretty well at first: though Michael’s average dropped to 32.5 points per game, the other players, especially Grant, Pippen, and the newly acquired Bill Cartwright, made up the difference. But the team struggled in the playoffs. Playing against Detroit in the Eastern Conference finals, Jordan had to expend so much energy running the offense he didn’t have much firepower left at the end of the game. We lost the series, 4–2.
The problem with making Jordan the point guard, as I saw it, was that it didn’t address the real problem: the fact that the prevalent style of offense in the NBA reinforced a self-centered approach to the game. As I traveled around the league scouting other teams, I was amazed to discover that everybody was using essentially the same modus operandi—power basketball. Here’s a typical sequence: the point guard brings the ball up and passes it inside to one of the big men, who will either make a power move to the hoop or kick the ball out to somebody on the wing after drawing a double team. The player on the wing, in turn, will either shoot, drive to the basket, or set up a screen-and-roll play. This style, an outgrowth of inner-city playground basketball, began to infiltrate the NBA in the late seventies with the emergence of Dr. J and other spectacular open-floor players. By the late eighties, it had taken over the league. Yet, though it can inspire breathtaking flights of creativity, the action often becomes stagnant and predictable because, at any given moment, only two or three players are involved in the play. Not only does this make the game a mind-numbing experience for players who aren’t big scorers, it also misleads everyone into thinking that basketball is nothing more than a sophisticated slam dunk competition.
The answer, in Tex Winter’s mind, was a continuous-motion offense involving everybody on the floor. Tex, a white-haired “professor” of basketball who had played under legendary coach Sam Berry at the University of Southern California, had made a name for himself in the 1950s when he turned little-known Kansas State into a national powerhouse using a system he’d developed, then known as the triple-post offense. Jerry Krause, who was then a scout, considered Tex a genius and spent a lot of time hanging out at Kansas State practices trying to see what he could absorb. The day after he was put in charge of the Bulls, Jerry called Tex, who had recently retired from a consulting job at LSU, and coaxed him into moving to Chicago to help rebuild the franchise.
Collins had decided against using Tex’s system because he thought it was better suited for college than the pros. He wasn’t alone. Even Tex had his doubts. He had tried to implement it as head coach of the Houston Rockets in the early seventies without much luck. Nevertheless, the more I learned about Tex’s system—which he now calls the triangle offense—the more convinced I became that it made sense for the Bulls. The Bulls weren’t a big, powerful team; nor did they have a dominant point guard like Magic Johnson or Isiah Thomas. If they were going to win the championship, it was going to be with speed, quickness, and finesse. The system would allow them to do that.
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.”
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 having 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.
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.