The Obtuse Triangle – New York Times

The sacred text arrived at dusk on a Thursday in November. I opened the package and found a 216-page, red hardbound book with worn buckram corners that brought to mind something used to teach high school geometry 50 years ago.

The previous owner had inscribed his name on the flyleaf and made sufficient notations in the margins throughout that I recalled a story about an old N.B.A. player whose teammate asked him why he underlined every sentence in the books he took on road trips. “That’s so I know I’ve read them,” he said.

The University of Kansas’ union bookstore had stamped the book “USED” and then penciled in a secondhand price, $5.50. Yet my Amazon third-party seller had charged me more than $160.

“You got it cheap,” the author’s middle son, known to his parents as Boy 2, later told me. One of the other two copies available at the time cost $700.

Fred “Tex” Winter, as he is identified in black on the book’s cover, was the head basketball coach at Kansas State in 1962 when he published “The Triple-Post Offense.” It is the foundational study of what became known as the triangle offense, the advanced operating system that Phil Jackson used from 1989 to 2011 to coach the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers to 11 N.B.A. championships. No other coach has won as many.

Like Jackson, Winter is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. Winter, though, is the only member selected for contributions made as an assistant coach — he was the secretary of offense in Jackson’s strategic cabinet until he had a stroke in 2009, at age 87 — making him the pure Hall of Fame strategist. These days he lives in Kansas, watching basketball on TV in a pale yellow house, and can no longer speak clearly enough to be interviewed.

After Jackson retired from the Lakers in 2011, the triangle offense vanished from the N.B.A. Then, in March 2014, Jackson became the Knicks’ president, and he and his freshman coaching protégé, Derek Fisher, recovered the triangle offense from obsolescence this season.

The Madison Square Garden version has not flourished: The Knicks finished with the second-worst record in the league. As a result, there have been bruits of vindication from those who contend that Jackson cruised to glory on the backs of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant while using the triangle offense as a flimflam means of mining credit for himself in the championship narrative — just another slow white man with a MacGuffin.

Disciples of the triangle offense, however, would suggest that the Knicks’ current travail has more to do with the gut renovation Jackson is imposing on the team’s talent-barren locker room than with any systemic humbug. To their way of thinking, the Knicks players Jackson inherited are so far from suited to Winter’s concepts of basketball space and time that, strategically speaking, the team is a ship becalmed somewhere off the coast of the Carolinas.

Those who merely spectate have long been similarly adrift. If pressed, few among us could with any confidence describe what the triangle offense is.

The system is basketball’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, renowned for being highbrow and difficult to understand. Yet trying to get through an abstruse book about the essence of cognition is one thing; that basketball could be over our heads is somehow harder to take.

It hasn’t helped matters that those who are devoted to the triangle offense refer to it simply as Triangle, elevating the operative word from mere adjective to lofty stand-alone noun. When Jeff Van Gundy, as the Knicks’ coach, mockingly called Jackson Big Chief Triangle, a lot of hoops-loving people felt validated.

In Triangle, the problem is bigger than Triangle. The system symbolizes the larger quandary of how inscrutable basketball’s formal strategies are for those who watch. Night after night across the big-time basketball landscape, offenses are run before vast audiences but are veiled to most fans.

In this way, I found the idea of Triangle particularly intriguing. An offensive system that had won all those championships in full public view yet remained off-limits to others — that seemed provocative, a sports riddle.

So I decided to spend this season reading Winter’s book while talking about the triangle with some of the more thoughtful basketball people I could find — all as a means of slowing the fast game down, getting closer to something I liked a lot that regularly eluded me.

Was Triangle the golden basketball mean? Was it a mirage? Mine would be a quest of sorts, deep into the heart of Winter.

To begin, I went old school — to the retired coach Pete Carril. Carril said he adapted his influential Princeton offense from the Red Auerbach-coached Celtics, whose center was Bill Russell, the big sun who warmed four orbiting teammates with passes.

“I took the best parts of the Boston Celtics,” Carril, who coached the Tigers from 1967 to 1996, said. “They moved the ball around, had good passers, good shooters, and the center who loved to pass the ball and built his game around helping four other guys succeed.”

That agrees with one of the major tenets of the triangle, which prefers the ball distribution to flow from the post rather than a guard out at the point. The triangle, similar to the Princeton offense, also asks for cuts along vectors plotted to maximize the use of floor space, stressing the defense with a relentless sequence of passes.

Like most of the professional and college coaches I spoke with, Carril abhors the current strategic trends in the N.B.A., which he thinks shun passing combinations in reducing the game to pick-and-rolls and 3-pointers.

“I don’t see the mystery of the triangle offense, except it goes against the grain of the way the game is played today,” Carril said.

He finds it telling that the current N.B.A. squad that plays a style most closely resembling the triangle is the San Antonio Spurs, last year’s champions; the team’s probing offense often runs through the skilled big man Tim Duncan, nicknamed the Big Fundamental. That leads Carril to imagine the yearning that Jackson must have felt when he watched Duke’s star freshman center, Jahlil Okafor, who is expected to be selected early in the N.B.A. draft.

Carril’s sophisticated redesign of Auerbach’s offense was the typical path of basketball progress. Most coaches — even the iconic ones — rely on something extant: Oklahoma State’s Henry Iba, for instance, is often credited with conceiving the motion offense that Bob Knight further developed. Among the many mysteries of the triangle offense, then, is why scarcely any teams use it.

In the N.F.L., a strategic insight that produces even one season’s worth of success is instantly appropriated by other coaches around the league. Yet when I asked Harvard’s Tommy Amaker about the triangle — again, a system that has produced 11 N.B.A. championships — his response was typical.

“I love watching it; everybody seems to be involved,” Amaker said. But, he added, he would never use the system as a coach because “it’s not something I know.”

That even Amaker, considered one of basketball’s most intelligent coaches, could not say much about the triangle seemed remarkable until I spoke with Jay Williams, an ESPN analyst. Williams played in the triangle in his one season with the Bulls before a career-ending motorcycle crash, yet he, too, was challenged to explain it.

“Me, I study the game every day,” Williams said. “I have an N.B.A. League Pass. I watch so many college games. I’m breaking down games every night.

“You hand me a piece of paper and say, ‘Jay, define the triangle for me,’ it’s kind of like a kid with Magic Markers drawing a cartoon. It’s all over the page. So many series of actions, I get lost trying to explain it. Now, give me four guys who know how to run it on the court, I can get out there and do it.”

Steve Kerr, who excelled in the triangle as a player with the Bulls and now coaches the Golden State Warriors, said it was difficult to find players who could execute nuanced passing and movement.

“Today’s game is so ball dominant,” he said. “Players grow up with the pick-and-roll, so they don’t naturally play without the ball.

“So many one-and-done guys are incredibly gifted,” Kerr continued, referring to players who jump to the N.B.A. after a year in college, “but they’re not seasoned fundamentally. In Triangle, they’d be completely lost.”

Some of the triangle reluctance, it would seem, also has to do with Jackson.

Jackson is the Montana-born, North Dakota-raised son of two Pentecostal ministers, a beyond-the-arc basketball pedigree that complements his heterodox approach to coaching. He motivated players while making reference to Buddhism, Native American rituals and pack animal behavior. Incense was burned; adverse spirits were exorcised; “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was read.

Similarly, Jackson’s chosen offense appeared less West Coast than Far East. Was the triangle offense so personal to Jackson as to be nontransferable?

To find a coach who does adapt his strategy year after year, I headed (by telephone) to the Research Triangle, to consult Mike Krzyzewski at Duke.

“I never try to put my players in a system,” he said, not long before his adjustments enabled the Blue Devils to win the national championship. “I try to create a system that’s good for my players.”

Had he thought of trying the triangle? The idea seemed to startle him.

It was so successful, I ventured. “The triangle didn’t win crap!” he said sternly. “Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant! Whatever offense I run, that offense didn’t do it. Winning means you had the caliber of players capable of winning a championship.”

Then he seemed to want to soothe the situation. “I have nothing against the triangle,” he said. “I think it’s a great offense. But it’s a lot better if Jordan loves it or Kobe loves it.”

The triangle, Krzyzewski said, is an offense of unconventional resort, well suited to a team without a classic point guard. Likewise, if you have a gifted player who transcends traditional positioning, like Jordan, Bryant or (theoretically) LeBron James, the triangle will allow him to play the lead in a way that also intensifies the contributions of his supporting teammates — like the sidemen in Miles Davis’s renowned quintets.

“I love Tex Winter,” Krzyzewski said. “Tex Winter is a brilliant coach and a good man. His concept of offense is spectacular, but it’s not suited for everybody.”

Our conversation was ending, and again Krzyzewski was unable to resist applying a little defensive pressure, saying, “The triangle’s not working in New York, by the way.”

Among Krzyzewski’s greatest coaching opponents was Jim Calhoun of Connecticut; invariably they faced each other in games of charged moment. Krzyzewski told me they were both “more people-oriented than system-oriented,” and Calhoun agreed. Sitting in his office on Jim Calhoun Way, where the stationery on his desk now says Coach Emeritus, he talked about strategy more or less nonstop for two hours.

The N.B.A., he said, “is awful to watch.” He shuddered. Where football has deepened its strategic complexity, basketball has regressed.

“Pete Carril thinks the triangle’s easy because that’s how the game was taught,” Calhoun said. “Today the kids don’t know the game he knew. Not a lot of back screens today.”

Jackson and Winter, Calhoun said, had achieved less sway than Auerbach because of these times.

“What the triangle gave the Bulls and the Lakers was an organized way to put five players on the same page,” he added. “It’s not a miracle cure. It creates freedom.”

I’d brought along my copy of “The Triple-Post Offense.” Calhoun picked it up, smiled and gave it back. “I looked at it when I was young,” he said. “You can get so lost in that.”

As I’d awaited my book, I’d imagined a lyric first line befitting a classic. “Call me Triangle.” “Triangle, light of my life, fire of my loins.”

Instead, Winter begins, “Set offensive patterns are designed to create good scoring opportunities — the fundamental purpose of all offenses.”

Well-known books by modern basketball coaches tend to use the game to impart life wisdom. An author may urge readers, as Pat Riley does in “The Winner Within,” to be good everyday teammates and “avoid the disease of more.” But there’s no such doctoring from Winter. What I had in my hands was an essay on proper basketball execution by a basketball man channeling his inner grammar instructor. “The Triple-Post Offense” is dense with “basic working positions,” drills and topical outlines; the triangle offense itself is not mentioned for 40 pages.

Between the covers, Winter is an exacting Rome-wasn’t-built-in-a-day sort. There are passages on developing tall, awkward boys into sound basketball players; screeds against “Fancy Dan” dribbling; and a decree that all players must improve their agility and fitness by jumping rope every day using “8-gauge cotton clothesline.” While explaining how to beat a defensive press, Winter allows that presses are “an insult to the team being pressed” because a press can thrive only against teams with a weak grasp of fundamentals.

Winter has seven principles — for passing. Here’s No. 2: “Eliminate all unnecessary movements in ball-handling and passing. Avoid slow winding-up actions. Eliminate stepping with the pass; use quick wrist and finger action on all passes. Cut the action of the pass off, or as short as possible.”

All this amounted to an insistence on efficiency, and as I read it, I heard myself murmur, “Omit needless words.” What I held in my hands wasn’t, I realized, Gödel, Escher, Bach or “The Winner Within.” It was “The Elements of Style” — the pithy little book on lucid prose by William Strunk Jr. that his student E. B. White revised and expanded into the classic volume on writing well. And what was the Strunk-to-White rhetorical give-and-go right there in the prefatory note describing their book? “It concentrates on fundamentals.”

Winter’s concept of lucid basketball holds that offensive players spaced at least 15 feet away from one another should assess vulnerabilities in the defensive formation and run plays in response. The system is called the triangle offense because ideally the center is down near the basket, in the post, as the initiating pass goes to a forward fanned out on the wing toward the sideline, with the guard who made that pass then hurrying over to the corner. Meanwhile, the spacing requires the two remaining players to occupy the other side of the court, known as the weak side. There is no ball-dominant guard, no coach calling out set stratagems.

In typical sequences, as a guard with the ball approaches the halfcourt “line of decision” and the other guard lags as a safety valve against ball pressure, the landscape is alive with options.

If even the lagging guard is denied the ball, the offense may run something like the “blind pig,” in which the weakside forward cuts out toward the ball for a pass that is redirected to the lagging guard, veering backdoor to the basket. If there has been no pressure and the triangle-side wing is free, the ball usually goes to him, and he initiates the attack. But if the wing is denied, the center could receive the ball in a passing option known as the squeeze while the wing makes a backdoor cut; then comes a screen by the triangle-side guard, freeing the lagging guard to receive the center’s pass for a shot.

Got that?

With every player the possible point of the newest beginning, crucial to the triangle are versatile athletes, with polished passing, movement and shooting skills allowing them to fulfill multiple roles. Jordan and Bryant scored from all over the court because their positioning varied from possession to possession.

A center capable of shooting from outside — Pau Gasol, for instance, or perhaps Frank Kaminsky, a senior at Wisconsin last season — is a coveted triangle commodity because he can give other players the opportunity to visit the post. O’Neal passed so well that he defeated the double teams his potent interior scoring skills attracted by operating like a lighthouse, locating the safe pathways ceded by the defense and beaming assists into the clear.

Winter empowers his players to read the defense and make situational decisions within the flow of the game, so the tricky part is that everyone must recognize the same opportunity and choose the same response. In effect, Winter wants five basketball Peyton Mannings on the floor, scanning the defense, deciphering its intentions, flashing around the court in well-spaced concert, exploiting vulnerability. Passes move faster than players, and Winter, like Carril, knows that defenses besieged by a ball in constant flight rarely sustain full effort for entire possessions.

The triangle offense is really more of a rubric than a system. “The Triple-Post Offense” contains a menu of options and counters sufficient to defeat any known defensive action. Winter has diagramed pages and pages of these discretionary choreographies, with the clarity and precision you’d expect from someone who studied architectural draftsmanship in the Navy.

Another red book requirement for playing under Winter is that players learn the exact dimensions of the court and even of the hoop itself. He has mapped the game, as it were, and he believes that if players become familiar with all of his coordinates, they will never lose control.

As an N.B.A. assistant, Winter was renowned for convincing professionals that it was in their interest to begin every practice with push passes, bounce-backs — the most basic basketball exercises.

Early in his and Jackson’s years with the Lakers, Winter was leading these 30 minutes of fundamentals, just as he had done in Chicago. The Lakers were running zigzags, a change-in-direction dribbling drill. O’Neal, listed at 7 feet 1 inch and 325 pounds, was not taking the drill seriously, and as a result nobody else was, either.

Winter (5-11, 140, and then approaching age 80) became enraged. When O’Neal next came down the court, Winter jumped in front of him to take the charge. O’Neal barely held up. “Do it right,” Winter barked up at him. And everyone did.

By the end of his book, Winter had me convinced that the triangle offense was the most comprehensive system ever devised for playing basketball. There was an insightful solution invented to forestall every known problem. It was a New Deal offense, wary, something fungible always in reserve.

Likewise, I was certain that Winter believed no team was ever truly ready to play games in the triangle because no team could know it as he did. That spoke to a core self-possession mixed with a certain fatality about others, a combination that might weigh heavily on a coach.

Sure enough, as I reached the last page of “The Triple-Post Offense,” I found that Winter had ceded his closing thought to Freud: “We can work together to remove your symptoms, but not your anxiety. That is our lot as men.”

Tex Winter grew up in an unpainted shack outside the Texas panhandle community Wellington — “the very capital of the Dust Bowl,” said his middle son, Chris. When Winter was 9, his father, Ernest, a mechanic, went on a fishing trip to the Texas Gulf, where he was speared by a marlin. The wound became infected, sepsis set in, and he died on Christmas. The family was living in Lubbock when Winter set out for California.

“Basically Steinbeck, the whole story,” Chris Winter said. “Dad was about 13. He rode out there, got work on a truck farm in the valley.”

For a time, Tex Winter salvaged overripe food, cut away the spoilage and put it on the family table.

Winter was compact and wiry, good for pole-vaulting, at which he excelled, but a disadvantage in basketball. He compensated with study. When the men’s team from Loyola University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount) practiced at his high school, he took notes on Coach Jimmy Needles’s reverse action offense; the succession of players coiling in and out of the box area provided an early triangle template.

An athletic scholarship took Winter to Oregon State, where he met Nancy Bohnenkamp, an English major who 68 years later remains his wife. She was bright and quirky, preferring to eat dessert first and referring to their three sons not by name but by birth order — Boy 3 was Brian, Boy 1 Russ (now a retired stockbroker living in Prague).

Winter’s first head coaching job, at 28, was at Marquette. Then he moved to Kansas State. One-and-dones need not apply: Before joining the varsity, Winter’s players often learned the offense by redshirting and then playing a year on the freshman team. Kansas State could rarely attract the country’s most coveted high school recruits, yet over the years Winter won nearly seven games out of 10.

Whether he was designing his own houses or advising the moving men on a better way to pack the truck, Winter was preoccupied with the efficient use of space. Basketball players were found objects to him, useful things in need of finish, and he approached day-to-day life similarly.

Winter was a claimer of curbside furniture, a collector of empty boxes and hotel shampoos, and his children recall him returning home from coaching clinics with his pockets stuffed with pastries, cookies and even beef Wellington.

“He’d get into Dumpsters, too,” his son Chris said. “He always had that ‘it’s got to be good for something’ mentality. But he was generous. He’d save money for himself, but for his extended family, he supported them. He was good to people who fell behind on their rent.”

Winter wrote “The Triple-Post Offense” longhand in a ranch house he planned and built in Manhattan, Kan. His writing desk had a basketball court painted on top and a glass surface placed over it on which he could make trial diagrams in black marker. For the actual drawings, there were rulers, compasses, L-squares and, inevitably, triangles.

There was a little bed in the room and a hulking Underwood on which Nancy Winter typed the manuscript. She edited as she typed, which led to arguments — and a pervasive smell of correction fluid. To Brian Winter, his father’s diagrams “looked like complex and interesting hieroglyphics.”

When a Baltimore Bullets scout named Jerry Krause visited Kansas State, Winter gave Krause his book to read. Krause complimented the book, and Winter mentioned that he had sent copies to his rival coaches in the Big 8 Conference.

“I said, ‘Why are you giving away your secrets?’ ” Krause said. “He said: ‘I’m not. It’ll only confuse them.’ ”

By the time Krause left town, he had decided that if Winter were ever given professional players, his sophisticated offense would “terrorize opponents.”

This did not turn out to be true from 1971 to 1973, when Winter was the coach of the Houston Rockets. By 1985, when Krause became the Bulls’ general manager, Winter had spent time at the University of Washington, Northwestern, Long Beach State and Louisiana State. “I called him the day after I took the job,” Krause said.

Under Coach Stan Albeck and then Doug Collins, the Bulls were an ascendant team, but they lost year after year in the playoffs. In 1987, Krause brought on Phil Jackson as another assistant. Krause told Jackson that Winter was a basketball genius, an absent-minded savant oblivious to everything but the personal meaning he found in basketball. He advised Jackson to seek Winter’s counsel, and Jackson did.

As a member of Red Holzman’s storied Knicks, Jackson had been a role player with a bad back who contributed through intelligent execution. Holzman, a defensive specialist, wasn’t much for formal offensive strategy. Instead, players like Walt Frazier, Willis Reed and Bill Bradley innovated on the run. Holzman designated Jackson “the diagramer,” making it his job to fill in new players on the team’s basic approach.

After their first season together as Bulls assistants, Jackson and Winter coached the Bulls’ team of rookies and development players in the Los Angeles summer league. Winter ran the triangle offense. He began every practice with his drills, and Jackson, who had never studied basketball theory on a granular level, loved those simple exercises, the way that across the weeks they led to something intricate.

The triangle “was a religion with Tex,” another Bulls assistant, Johnny Bach, said. “He believed in it body and soul.”

Bach said of Jackson’s come-to-Triangle moment, “Through some mystical bonding with Tex, Phil came to believe in it.”

Back in Chicago, the two men spent a great deal of time together and became close.

“Dad had technical expertise,” Chris Winter said. “Phil had great understanding of players, matchups, a special feel for the game.”

Together they watched old Kansas State film and discussed books by old coaches like John Bunn and Everett Dean and the old ideas of Southern California’s Sam Barry.

“They’re both a little goofy — in positive ways,” Krause said. “Phil’s a strange bird himself, Tex is a strange bird, and they saw that in each other, and they bonded.”

Chris Winter said that while his father was a less worldly person than Jackson, Tex Winter came to see how effective Jackson’s use of spirituality and ritual was in coaching the triangle.

“When wolves hunt, they spread out, space themselves,” Chris Winter said. “It’s a complex life-and-death operation. They don’t catch something, they’ll starve. Phil really believed Triangle was a predatory machine.”

In 1989, Jackson became the Bulls’ head coach, and he told the team that he planned to run Winter’s system.

“This triangle offense!” forward Horace Grant said, recalling the introduction of a reactive style of play to athletes who valued aggression. “Believe me, with the Bulls, we started running it — we thought that it was Stephen Hawking talking to us. If you never, ever spoke Mandarin in your life, it was trying to learn Mandarin in the first year.

“We were stepping on one another’s feet, falling down. Everybody thought Tex was crazy, and we thought Phil was crazy for listening to him. In the beginning, we all rebelled. We wanted to run and dunk. Athletes don’t want fundamentals. You want to run like a gazelle! Like a Doberman!”

One reason for the Pistons’ success against Chicago in the years before Jackson took over was that Detroit’s physicality wore Jordan down. Jackson and Winter’s thinking was that if they built more offensive options around him, Jordan would have greater reserves of energy at the end of playoff games. They told Jordan that for 20 seconds, the team would stay in the offense. If no clear scoring opportunities emerged, then he should create one. Jordan was skeptical; he called the triangle “a white man’s offense.”

Grant remembers what Winter’s practices were like. “Every day we began with passing, cutting and screening,” he said. “Every day. Every single day. Fundamental basketball. We weren’t bored. It was so intriguing to us. We wanted to learn something different. We’d been not so successful in the playoffs.”

Eventually, Grant said, all of the players were converted.

“You need intelligence to run Triangle,” Grant said. “We have great one-on-one athletes out there in the N.B.A., but to be as one, you need to know your role in Triangle. When the defense shuts 10 options down, we have 10 more. If a pass goes to the corner, we as a team know where to set screens, where to cut. Pass goes into the post to Bill Cartwright, we know all the picks on the other side of the floor.

“It was a smooth operating machine. Baryshnikov in action! Picasso painting! A beautiful thing! Having Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen helped, too. Shot clock’s at four, it all breaks down, then Jordan time.”

Jackson said that only after the Bulls finally defeated the Pistons in 1991 did Jordan embrace the offense, and Krause remembered it the same way.

“Michael’s smart as hell,” Krause said. “It took him a few months, but then he realized what he could do in Triangle. He went back to Carolina, and all he did all summer was work on post stuff. For the next eight or 10 years, he scored more points in the post than most centers did.”

A basketball team is an intimate community of people, and in Chicago, and later in Los Angeles, Winter was a beloved figure who made the long season a little better for players. Kerr said: “He had a funny way of describing his childhood hardships. ‘I grew up in Texas. My family decided to move to California. But I found them!’ ”

Winter was known to keep lookout in the hotel hallway during road trips, scanning the floor for room-service trays with promising leftovers. He claimed this was a coaching lesson about waste and opportunity. At Christmastime, the players and the coaches gave one another Secret Santa gifts; one year, Winter received an extender fork long enough to reach across restaurant tables.

Jordan and the others grew to admire how competitive Winter was, and how democratic, how he remained forever his own man. As coach, Collins had barred Winter from the bench during games because he was so scathing, and Jackson, too, endured in-game critiques: “Phil, Scottie’s throwing the ball all over the place — sit him down!” and frequently, “Phil, you’re getting outcoached!”

When people referred to Winter as a consultant, Winter corrected them — “Insultant!”

“I loved it,” Jackson said, “but it was hard, and he knew it. He’d say, ‘I know I’m hard to live with.’ ”

Kerr, who admired that “Tex was so committed to what he believed in,” said: “He stood up to anybody. He’d argue with Phil, yell at Michael. Michael respected that. He never wanted anybody to kiss his butt. Every once in a while I’d be on the bench, Michael would make a mistake, and Tex would say: ‘Get Michael out of there! He’s killing us!’ Get Kerr in there. I’d be shrugging: ‘Don’t look at me.’ ”

Jordan respected Winter because he was not satisfied unless things were done right, Chris Winter said. After the Bulls beat the Portland Trail Blazers in a game in the 1992 finals — they went on to secure their second championship — “Dad was kind of shaking his head in the hospitality room about Horace Grant making wrong decisions,” Chris Winter said, “and Mom told him: ‘Fred, Can’t you enjoy the moment? We won!’ ”

Jackson and Winter’s 1999 triangle debut with the Lakers somewhat replicated the Bulls experience. Once again they took on a talented team that had been losing in the playoffs. To speed the installation, the Lakers brought in veterans who had triangle experience, like Ron Harper.

Bryant received what amounted to a private tutorial in that first triangle season, his fourth season in the N.B.A. Early on, he broke his hand, so he watched from the bench beside Winter, an experience that Bryant said was “like Luke Skywalker sitting next to Yoda and Yoda hitting him upside the head — he’d think out loud about what he’d see, and we’d discuss it.”

Bryant enjoyed how “intense” and “brutal” Winter could be, saying: “He was rough on everybody. That’s why I am the way I am, probably.”

Bryant, not yet the fully formed star Jordan had been in Chicago, found the offense completely absorbing.

“In the triangle, every day you’re uncovering something new — a little Easter egg’s hidden somewhere,” he said.

Bryant was introverted and seething with ambition — he “thirsted” to score, as Jackson put it — and at times there was tension between them.

“Years ago Phil had a kidney stone,” the writer Charley Rosen, Jackson’s friend, said. “He called his kidney stone Kobe because it wouldn’t pass.”

Bryant was still a young player, and Jackson eventually asked Jordan to speak with him.

“It was great,” Bryant said. “He talked about challenges he found trusting his teammates.”

Jordan advised Bryant to play within the system until the last few seconds of possessions and the last few minutes of games. Then Bryant could take over. As a result, “I led the team in assists every damn year,” he said. But if his teammates did not hit their shots, he said, he’d handle the job himself.

Bryant likes to say, “I was raised by Tex,” yet even he was taken aback when the team gathered for a championship parade and Winter seized the moment to say: “You have to work on your overhead passes. You’re slinging the ball all over the place. It almost cost you a championship.”

Bryant recalled: “We said: ‘Dude! Go with the flow! Enjoy the parade!’ He cared only about basketball excellence.”

The opposing coach whose approach against the triangle Winter most respected was Larry Brown of the 76ers (among other teams). Brown, now at Southern Methodist, said he applied backcourt pressure so the offense had less time to explore openings. But, he added, “The best-laid plans — they had passing centers to relieve pressure.”

Brown thinks highly of Jackson.

“You hear so many times he always had the best players,” he said. “It’s not so easy to coach great players, not so easy to put them in position to be successful.”

Brown used to tweak his college coach, North Carolina’s Dean Smith, telling him that because of the Tar Heels’ annual surplus of talented recruits, “it doesn’t matter what you do!”

“Looking back,” Brown said, “that was stupid. He could get great players to do what he wanted them to do unconditionally. That’s how you win.”

This winter, I met Jackson for a conversation in his office at the Knicks’ practice complex, in Westchester County. Behind a desk, Jackson looks younger than his 69 years. Then he gets to his feet, and the slow, rigid unfurling brings to mind a North Dakota oil-field pump jack.

The dimly lit room had a spare, gray-toned aesthetic, but it didn’t feel austere so much as Zendo calm and peaceful, and Jackson seemed the same way. Why wouldn’t he be? He knew the Knicks’ roster did not offer the same lush means he inherited with the Bulls and the Lakers. For a competitive and public person, it’s exciting to have a high-profile new challenge when perhaps you thought your career was over, especially a challenge that allows you to address years of pointed criticism. One reason Jackson worked with Bryant and Jordan so well is that he enjoyed proving a point as much as they did. Bryant loved Jackson’s kidney stone gibe because it told him, “He’s sarcastic just like I am.”

In the office, some more of what had made Jackson such a successful N.B.A. coach was apparent. He asked many questions, listened carefully, had a charismatic presence yet was also a bit detached. The best coaches make other people want to please them.

Some fans are not pleased with Jackson the executive. He has noticed. As a former Knicks player, he knew New York was emotional about basketball. Yet the fevered preoccupation with the triangle caught him off guard.

“The focus on the system of basketball was overwhelming for our audience and for the players,” he had written to me in an email before we’d met.

Jackson has been at pains to be accountable for the Knicks’ awful season, telling Harvey Araton of The New York Times this year, “So far, my experiment has fallen flat on its face.”

Jackson said he had reminded Fisher, his first-year coach, that his job was not to defend an offensive approach. Jackson thought that he had brought some of the scorn on himself by writing a book that was “an homage” to the offense and by being so open about “a spiritual aspect of the game.”

When Jackson talks about the fundaments of the triangle, you can imagine his parents speaking about the responsibility of churches to shape individuals within the faith, as you can envision Jackson convincing Jordan of the virtues of community basketball.

“We feel there’s a certain organizational intelligence where, if you take the burden on yourself, it’s not as good as when you incorporate the team,” he said.

Jackson said of Jordan: “He had to work so damn hard against Detroit. They relied on pressure, coming further and further upcourt, challenging the guards. We used automatics, and Michael saw what it can do. The ability to adjust, make changes, have counters, gave dominance to the Bulls and Lakers.”

And, Jackson said, just as the triangle helped Jordan thrive, Jordan was the hypotenuse, completing the system.

“Even if you have a good system with nice ball movement, good activity,” he said, “you need a special player to finish the game.”

When Bryant is told that the triangle prospered only because he was involved, he objects. “You’re supposed to win with a bunch of bums?” he said. “It baffles me to hear people talk about how this is a team sport and then say the triangle was only successful because Phil had great players. We were successful because we played in such a beautiful system. We had great coaches. It’s all in conjunction.”

Jackson said: “You have a player like Michael Jordan, you’re going to have the opportunity to win championships. But to be able to do it consecutive times, three championships, and three more, that says a lot about what a team created.”

So, I asked him, how does it feel when people say he won only because he had Jordan, Pippen, O’Neal and Bryant? He brightened. “Feels great!” he said. “I’m so glad I had those players. Made all the difference.”

In Carmelo Anthony, the Knicks have a productive offensive player capable of creating scoring opportunities at the end of possessions and late in games. But throughout his All-Star career, Anthony has never been known to play particularly well with others. And beyond Anthony, the roster offers scant evidence of any lurking swamis of the triangle.

“Identifying players who can be good at it is our chore,” Jackson said.

Winter’s thinking, his son Chris said, is that the Knicks need a center like Duke’s Okafor and a couple of other vital pieces — including a certain 93-year-old.

“Dad’s always had the notion that if you really wanted to teach at that level you kind of need him,” Chris Winter said, adding that although his father might not yet recognize the Knicks’ rendition of his ideas, “he has lots of confidence in Phil that he will come up with players because he’s a guy who everything he touches turns to gold.”

“My dad thinks Phil’s the luckiest guy in the world,” Chris Winter continued, “and luck’s an important thing in that business.”

During Jackson’s Chicago years, the Bulls continually sought to buttress Jordan and Pippen with quick-witted, adaptable, selfless players, including Cartwright, Harper, Dennis Rodman and Kerr, a deadly shooter who moved more quickly in sequence with four teammates than in a straight line.

“He’d been released,” Krause said. “I don’t think he’d’ve had a job in the N.B.A. if not for Triangle. He fit Triangle like a glove. I came to the office one day at 7 a.m. I see a notice Steve Kerr’s been released. I called his agent — we’re interested. Tex came running in an hour later. ‘Jerry! Steve Kerr’s been released. Get him. He fits.’ I said, ‘Coach, I already did.’ ”

In this, his first season as an N.B.A. head coach, Kerr leaned heavily on Winter’s example, he said. The Golden State practices formally began with the basics.

When Kerr was introducing what he calls “a faster, more freelance version of Triangle,” Warriors players initially reacted to push passes and toss-backs as Bulls players once had, he said. “Guys were saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” Kerr said.

Like the Bulls, the Warriors had been a strong regular-season team without much playoff success. “The first month was tough,” Kerr said. “I didn’t want to be the guy to change the culture — I hate the phrase ‘change the culture.’ ”

The Warriors began the season 5-0, but Kerr considered the victories pyrrhic because of the team’s many turnovers. He was waking up at 4 a.m. thinking that even as he was trying to emphasize sounder fundamentals, the Warriors were profligate — doomed.

After a couple of sloppy losses, “I snapped,” Kerr said, adding that he uncharacteristically used some expletives in yelling at his players. Soon after, he was pleased to discover that the starters Klay Thompson and Andrew Bogut had told reporters that although they at first wondered about all those drills, the drills were helping. Golden State ended the regular season with the N.B.A.’s best record and went on to win the championship.

The lone mainstream coach who has been running the triangle offense in recent years is Tara VanDerveer, the women’s coach at Stanford, one of only 10 men and women to have won 800 games with a single Division I college program. She said she turned to the triangle in 2002 “because we could not defend it.”

She continued: “We were playing Colorado. We lost. But before that, to get ready to play them, our scout team ran Triangle. They were scoring all over our starters, having fun.”

As we spoke, VanDerveer’s enthusiasm for the triangle seemed limitless. She extolled its solid foundational principles; she compared it to jazz because “you have to listen to what others are playing and be ready to respond”; she described her exhilaration when she first watched Kerr’s Warriors and recognized textbook patterns.

“The ball movement is beautiful!” she said, sounding the way people do when they are discussing the source of deep significance in their lives — which she readily admitted. “With Triangle you have to really drink the Kool-Aid. It’s a little all-or-nothing.”

Then she addressed a source of sorrow. Because the strength of Stanford’s roster this season was guards, she could no longer run the triangle.

“It was really hard for me to let it go,” she said. “So we went cold turkey. No triangle.”

Developing something new was difficult. VanDerveer said she became an insomniac, watching video deep in the night, permanently fast forwarded so she could review more tape.

“I’m trying to absorb things,” she said. “I can’t draft players that fit my style the way the Knicks can. I’m at the mercy of the dean of admissions.”

During the day, VanDerveer would frequently drop in on the Stanford men’s coach, Johnny Dawkins, who, coincidentally, began running the triangle last season. “I want to get my fix!” she would tell him. “Got to get my fix of Triangle!”

The Stanford men “struggled a little bit last year,” she said. “They had to think. In basketball you have to flow.”

She added, “With Triangle you might take your lumps early, but it’ll pay off later.”

Dawkins said, similarly: “It takes time. So many different components. But it’s an offense that can be and will be effective.”

Dawkins and VanDerveer both guessed that in New York, Fisher was having a similar experience. But VanDerveer promised that the Knicks would find “great satisfaction when it comes to fruition, and I don’t have any doubt that it will.”

By this point, my own enthusiasm for the triangle had increased to where it had such positive valence, I thought about it as I played. Even in recreational basketball, the recurrent feeling is of heightened possibility — in each new possession, so much could be about to happen. During my triangle months, the way I played didn’t change, but this sense of the game as intervals of renewed potential grew.

It was as though I’d been jolted into seeing how little I knew of a city I’d inhabited for years. As I ran the court, I’d think of all the things lingering out there to be done that even I could manage if only there were instructions. And of course, there were (costly) instructions; I owned them. But I was past my time, and sometimes when I crossed the baseline in the usual path, I would regret that I would never learn such an original approach to something I enjoyed so much.

Still, I could watch.

When I followed the N.C.A.A. tournament or the N.B.A. playoffs, the many possessions across the many important games now folded into one another, the games lost form, and I often grew disaffected. Looking back at old Chicago triangle video, however, I could see that because the passes and cuts happened so cleanly, the counterintuitive result was that it all looked slower. No wasted movement — a more explicit viewing experience. Each possession followed a visible logic, even at maximum operating speed. I couldn’t know all the options at hand, but I could see five people achieving lethal unison that was so compelling, I realized Winter had made me see the familiar game with fresh vividness.

It’s rare to read a theory of anything and have it come to life off the page. It’s also rare in big-market sports for a team to visibly reinvent itself. I was glad the Knicks were willing to do this with Jackson. I hoped his Knicks would succeed because I wanted to see all those bygone Winter ideas in present motion.

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