Interesting article about offense (remember that?) in the NBA

["Berry, Mark S" <berrym@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I thought this was interesting and relevant to the Celtics, because... well,
the Celtics don't have an offense. Check out this quote from Lakers
assistant coach Tex Winter: "I think the team concept is a little more in,
as opposed to featuring, trying to feature one or two players on a ballclub,
going through them fairly much exclusively to score." Hmm. Can someone
please forward this to Obie?

Anyway, it's written by David Aldridge. Enjoy. -- Mark

There were times when they wondered, as they watched games that looked like
mosh pits, if the flow would ever come back. They believed in offense,
believed that players wanted to move and run and shoot. But the Celtic Fast
Break and the Lakers' Showtime had given way to the Bad Boys of Detroit, and
the wrestling ways of Riles and the Knicks, and they were winning titles and
getting to the Finals. And even teams that weren't knew the one way they
could compete was to play an 80-79 game, so they slowed the ball to a walk,
and sent three guys back to strangle the fast break, and the NBA looked so,
so bad, both in person and on television.
Rod Thorn saw it from his perch at Olympic Tower, where he dished out
justice as the league's VP of operations and changed every rule except five
to a side to try to get more points on the board.
Geoff Petrie and Rick Adelman saw it from Portland, where they tried to hold
off the rushing tide of slowdown ball with the hard-running Blazers.
Eddie Jordan saw it from the farthest outpost of the NBA -- Sacramento,
Calif.
Tex Winter saw it, even as his triangle offense -- the one that preached
movement and selflessness while still getting the ball to Michael Jordan 40
times a game -- was utilized to win six championships in eight years. Still,
the whispers (which weren't even really whispers) were unending: well, it's
not a pro offense. It's never worked when Jordan wasn't playing in it. The
mixed feelings about the triangle were best expressed in Sam Smith's
anecdote in his journal of the 1991 Bulls, The Jordan Rules:
Winter, to Jordan: "There is no I in Team."
Jordan, to Winter: "There is in Win."
But even though the Bulls won, no one else could get the doggone triangle to
work. Cotton Fitzsimmons tried it in Phoenix, and abandoned it in a month;
Quinn Buckner and Jim Cleamons tried to bring it to Dallas, and got
cashiered almost before their first checks were dry. The score averages kept
dropping, and people kind of accepted as fact the notion that you couldn't
run or score 100 points in an NBA game anymore unless Paul Westhead's
Nuggets were your opponents.
"Because a coach can have more impact on the defensive end of the court, you
can get your guys in the right position, for the guys who are great
defensive coaches," Thorn said this week. "They may not be great individual
defenders, but you can get them to the right positions. So I think you have
a better chance to have an impact on a team 95 percent of the time on the
defensive end of the floor. Teams that aren't very good, or weren't very
good, have a chance to get better quicker by becoming better defensively.
(Riley) obviously had a huge impact on how the game was played."
And so it went for nearly a decade, until the haze started to clear a
little, and Petrie got put in charge in Sacramento, and brought his friend
Adelman in to coach, and started drafting Euros who could shoot, and got
Chris Webber in what must, charitably, be called the Steal of the Century,
and played on Vlade Divac's desire to return to the West Coast. Until a
college coach brought his unworkable, nutty little college offense to the
pros. Until Nellie, Lord love him, Nellie, came off the beach in Maui and
got free reign to bring in all the shooters he wanted to the Mavericks, and
had an owner who wanted to fill the building, and knew he wouldn't fill it
playing those 80-79 games, and until Jim O'Brien got the reins in Boston,
and said, fine, 'Toine, shoot as much as you like, but make sure Paul gets
to shoot, too, and until George Karl threw up his hands in Milwaukee and
gave in to his players, who thought the best way to play defense was to have
the other team take the ball out of the freakin' basket.
And until the league said to hell with it, play any defense you want.
And isn't it ironic that in the year the zone comes to the NBA, offense --
blessed offense! -- has come back?
Is it permanent? Is it cyclical? Who knows. But this season, four teams
averaged more than 100 points, and of those four, three -- Sacramento,
Dallas and the Lakers -- made the second round of the playoffs or better.
And since winning is the only thing people understand, there is hope, for
the first time in a long time, that other teams will try to copy what's
worked this season, that they'll see Jason Kidd running the break to
perfection and they will draft shooters instead of bangers; that other
coaches will insist on transition instead of paying lip service to it ("We
intend to run," Hometown NBA Coach has said at every introductory press
conference since 1967).
"I think the team concept is a little more in, as opposed to featuring,
trying to feature one or two players on a ballclub, going through them
fairly much exclusively to score," Winter says. "Your best player is still
going to be your top scorer. Cream rises to the top? Dallas is another team
I think that's gone to more of a team concept, and I think it's coming back
into the game, as opposed to the pro sets, so-called pro sets, where they
come down and have a signal for every single play and everybody in the
league practically runs the same thing. It pleases me because I think it's a
much more interesting brand of basketball."
Of course, you have to have personnel that can do those things. But first,
you have to be willing to look for those kinds of players.
"We have a lot of guys that can pass, shoot and put it on the floor,"
Adelman says. "New Jersey has Jason, obviously, but they have other guys who
can do that, too. Dallas certainly does that. But if you're a coach and you
don't have that? I tried that in another spot (Golden State) and it didn't
work. So you have to have the people. And I'm real fortunate. I have Vlade
and Chris, two big guys that can really pass the ball. And that really helps
you play that way. But again, it takes time. We went through a couple of
years where everybody loved us, but they thought we were nuts sometimes, the
way we played. But you've got to give guys a chance to be creative, to make
mistakes, so they can get better at making decisions."
With Petrie and Adelman in place, the Kings were going to push the ball. But
they got a big assist from Pete Carril, the former Princeton coach whose
backcutting offense almost beat Georgetown in the NCAAs, and did beat UCLA,
and who had been friends with Petrie for more than 30 years. So when Carril
was done with being a head guy in college, he was happy to join Eddie Jordan
in Sacramento as an assistant and sounding board. Jordan had stayed in touch
with Carril since he tried to beat him while the starting point guard at
Rutgers in the 1970s.
"It was always tough to defend," Jordan said. "But (it wasn't) until I got
with Pete, when we were together in Sacramento, that I really liked the
concept. The NBA was coming to a two-man game, and everyone else stood
still. I knew basketball's not that way."
Carril's presence wasn't enough to save Jordan's job; that was the end of
the Mitch Richmond era and the Kings were a year away from striking the
talent mother lode. But Jordan loved what Carril thought about offense.
"What passing does is, it takes all the tension out of the game," Carril
says. "Because there's tension any time you get five people together, trying
to do something on a cooperative basis. There's going to be tension. Each
person has his own ideas as to how you should go about playing. So when you
pass the ball, the sense of urgency to take the next shot isn't as great
because you know the ball's going to come around again."
Once Petrie got Adelman players who could think and pass at the same time,
the Kings took off. Even with Jason Williams and his active imagination at
the point, Sacramento became the talk of the league two years ago because
they actually ran!
Last summer, of course, Petrie got Mike Bibby to run the show, and now
Sacramento could actually execute once the ball slowed down, too, and this
season, the Kings won bigger than they had since 1951. Really. Since 1951.
Now, the Kings don't actually run the Princeton sets in their halfcourt
offense. But they've gelded that philosophy with the pro notion that with a
24-second clock, the ball ultimately has to find its way into the hands of
your best players.
"Pete's been a great, great contributor here," Petrie says, "in terms of how
we all work together and incorporating the best of what the pro game has
with some of his ideas about a halfcourt offense that does have movement,
where there's sharing of the ball, playing through your center, in ways more
than just throwing it into the low post and get it up there somehow and see
if you can get it in."
The players, of course, love it.
"I believe it's the way basketball's supposed to be played," says center
Scot Pollard. "You go inside, you go outside, a balanced attack. We fast
break whenever we can, and sometimes it's a little rushed, but I prefer that
to coming down and passing it five times before you look at the basket, and
you have to set three screens before you can shoot."
Jordan wanted to bring the offense to the Nets when he joined the team as an
assistant, but the time was never right. When the Nets acquired Kidd last
summer, and signed Todd MacCulloch to be their starting center, Jordan went
to Carril.
"Eddie called me during the summer and wanted to get together," Carril said.
"I told him I didn't think I could do that. (But) I really like Eddie a lot.
He got fired that year here in Sacramento for all the wrong reasons. He
stood up for his principles and it would have been better if he had been
more pragmatic or taken the easy way out. But we talked, and he's got a lot
of tapes. I actually talked with it more with Eddie in part because he'd
played at Rutgers -- and he constantly reminds me that he played on five
Rutgers teams that never lost to Princeton."
Several phone conversations later, Jordan was convinced it could work in New
Jersey. But he had to convince Byron Scott.
Carril "showed me, he taught me how to teach it, and Byron also, so we got
along with it," Jordan said. Scott "said 'Can they learn it?' I said 'Yeah,
in five minutes.' The summer team did, the summer league team did it, and
that's where it was born for us."
The sets kept working in training camp, and also during the regular season
-- winning over Kidd, who was at least a little unsure that they could work.
"If there was any resistance by him, I didn't see it," Thorn said. "He could
get more assists, for instance, if we played more like he played in Phoenix,
where he played more pick and rolls. He could average another assist and a
half a game. But I think it's easier for him to play this way. It's not as
grueling on him."
With two teams that move without the ball in the Finals, one can only hope
that others will try to imitate what has worked this season and go for more
flow. Because yes, the triangle works better when Michael Jordan and Shaq
and Kobe are running it. But teams have run variations of it in the league
since the Syracuse Nationals. Larry Costello's Bucks and Jack Ramsay's
Blazers, each NBA champions, had some triangle elements. Utah's run an
offense with similarities to Carril's since Jerry Sloan became head coach.
And the triangle and Princeton offenses are closely related.
If it works, people will follow.
"I'm happy about it," the 71-year-old Carril says, "maybe because I'm old. I
remember years ago, when guys like K.C. Jones and Sam Jones and Dick
McGuire, and all those guys from the Lakers were playing, Slater Martin, you
go back all those years and watch the way they played. Philadelphia and Hal
Greer and Mo Cheeks, when he played. All those guys were good at that.
Portland when they had Bill Walton, guys going backdoor like crazy, throwing
passes. It was fun to watch that. And I think it's come back to that. I
think an older person would notice that and would like it. Perhaps if I were
40 years younger, I would be more impressed with the dunks and the
athleticism that some of these guys have."