Tex Winter first developed his triangle offense decades ago, but it went nowhere until he got the Bulls to adopt it, after Phil Jackson became head coach. It’s an unorthodox approach to offensive basketball, to be sure, but it’s not like the wishbone or the veer or the run-and-shoot in football–grand schemes that dramatically alter the offense and that demand to be taken on their own terms by the defense. The triangle is more a philosophy than a strategy, more an outline than a scheme; it replaces set plays with patterns and tendencies, diagrams with positions on the floor. It may not work for any other basketball team in the world, but it has certainly been the trick for the Bulls.
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The triangle is so named because, in its most basic form, Bill Cartwright posts up low on the right-hand side of the lane, Paxson sets up on the right wing, and Jordan dribbles near the free-throw circle, creating a triangle formation. Pippen and Grant set up on the left so that if the defense is too firmly entrenched on the right Jordan can pass to Pippen, who passes in to Grant while Jordan moves without the ball into the left-hand baseline corner, establishing another triangle. In actual practice, it works as follows. Against Houston two weeks ago, Pippen drove on a mid-tempo fast break and ran right into the Rockets’ intimidating center, Hakeem Olajuwon. Pippen backed out on the dribble, into the right-hand corner, drawing Olajuwon and another defender. Pippen then swung the ball swiftly to Paxson high on the right wing, who then passed to Jordan high on the left wing, who took an open three-point shot and hit it, giving the Bulls a 57-41 lead on the way to a 20-point first-half advantage that would all but put the game away. The triangle gives Jordan and Pippen the ability to probe the defense for weakness and sets them within a framework that makes it easiest to exploit that weakness with an open shot.
Defense is by nature, well, defensive; there’s no better way to put it. The defense reacts to the offense and attempts to counter its strengths and strategies. The Bulls win with a defensive intensity as keen as any in the league. They learned much from the Detroit Pistons in the last few years (as has much of the league–especially in the Eastern Conference). The National Basketball Association doesn’t allow zone defenses–the scheme of preference in college–placing instead an emphasis on offense and one-on-one driving. Oddly enough, this emphasis on offense made the pro game not more interesting but less. Before Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird arrived in the league over a decade ago–and even, for a while, after–it was commonly said that an NBA game was 46 minutes of guys running up and down and then 2 minutes of basketball. The players were simply too skilled offensively; in most cases, 24 seconds was ample time for someone to find an open shot and make it. The Pistons changed that. They allowed no uncontested shot. If Paxson had an open 20-footer from the wing, John Salley was out running with a hand in the air as he put the shot up. That’s what separated the Pistons from the rest, and that’s still what separates the contenders from the pretenders in the NBA, where much of the Western Conference continues to play as if defense were just the way to spend time until a team gets the ball back.
Gambling is key: it’s what separates the Bulls from most other NBA teams; it’s what makes their defense so important to their offense. Again, however, the key word is judicious, as in judicious gambling–risks Jordan and Pippen know the rest can cover for. Jordan and Pippen are cat quick, but in Grant they have a player large enough to be an enforcer and quick enough to make up for their mistakes. “Whenever Michael or Scottie goes for a steal,” Grant says, “it’s up to the other guys on the court to make sure their guy doesn’t get to the basket.”
