Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (6 page)

—

The next season—1973–74—was one the best of my career. I settled into my role as sixth man and averaged 11.1 points and 5.8 rebounds per game. But the team was going through a transformation that worried me.

The hallmark of the championship Knicks was the extraordinary bond among the players and the selfless way we worked together as a team. That bond was particularly strong during our advance to the first championship in 1970. After the arrival of Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas, and Dean Meminger in 1971, the team chemistry shifted, but a new bond formed that was more strictly professional in nature yet no less effective. We didn’t spend a lot of time with one another off the court, but we meshed brilliantly on the floor. Now the team was going through another sea change, but this time the effect would be more disruptive.

We struggled to hold things together during the 1973–74 season with Reed, Lucas, and DeBusschere hobbled by injuries, and we limped into the Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics after barely surviving a tough seven-game series with the Bullets. The pivotal moment came in game 4 in Madison Square Garden, with the Celtics up 2–1 in the series and young backup center John Gianelli and me trying to make up for our diminished big men. But this time there would be no magical Willis Reed epiphany. Boston’s Dave Cowens and John Havlicek knew how to take advantage of our lack of strong front-court leadership and outmaneuvered us at every critical turn in the second half. Boston won 98–91.

The Celtics finished us off three days later in Boston en route to another successful championship run against the Milwaukee Bucks. I remember sitting in Logan Airport with my teammates after that loss and feeling as if our once-glorious dynasty had come to an end. Lucas and DeBusschere had already announced that they were planning to retire. By the time the next season got under way, Reed and Barnett had also moved on and Meminger had been picked up by New Orleans in the expansion draft and traded to Atlanta.

Nothing was the same after that. I stepped in as a starter the next year to replace DeBusschere and played pretty well, but only three other members of the core team remained—Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Earl Monroe—and it was difficult to forge the kind of unity we’d had before. Times were changing, and the new players flooding into the NBA were more interested in showing off their flashy skills and living the NBA high life than in doing the hard work of creating a unified team.

Over the next two years, we added some talented players to the roster, including All-NBA star Spencer Haywood and three-time NBA scoring champion Bob McAdoo, but neither of them seemed to be that interested in mastering the Knicks’ traditional combination of intense defense and selfless teamwork.

Every day the gap between generations became more apparent. The new players, who were accustomed to being pampered in college, started complaining that nobody was taking care of their laundry or that the trainer wasn’t doing good enough tape jobs. The old Knicks were used to taking responsibility for our own laundry because there was no equipment manager then, and strange as it may sound, washing our own uniforms had a unifying effect on the team. If the newcomers weren’t willing to wash their own gear, we wondered whether they would take responsibility for what they had to do on court.

It didn’t take long to find out. Within a remarkably short time, the Knicks transitioned into a dual-personality team that could run up 15-point leads, then collapse at the end because we couldn’t marshal a coordinated attack. We held several team meetings to discuss the problem, but we couldn’t agree on how to bridge the gap. Nothing Red did to stimulate team play worked.

In 1976 the Knicks failed to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years. A year later Bradley retired and Frazier was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Then Red stepped down and was replaced by Willis Reed.

—

I thought the 1977–78 season would be my last, but in the off-season the Knicks made a deal to send me to the New Jersey Nets. I was reluctant at first, but I agreed to come on board when coach Kevin Loughery called and told me that he needed my help to work with the younger players. “I know you’re at the end of your career,” he said, “but coming to New Jersey could be a good bridge between playing and coaching.”

I wasn’t that interested in becoming a coach, but I was intrigued by Loughery’s maverick style of leadership. After training camp, Loughery said he wanted to move me over to assistant coach, but before that could happen forward Bob Elliott got injured and I was activated as a player. Nevertheless, I got a chance that year to work with the big men as a part-time assistant coach and take over for Kevin as head coach when he was thrown out of games by the refs, which happened fourteen times that season.

Loughery, who had won two ABA championships, had an exceptional eye for the game and was gifted at exploiting mismatches. But what I learned from him was how to push the envelope and get away with it. Loughery was the first coach I knew who had his players double-team inbound passers at half-court, a high-risk move that often paid off. He also adopted Hubie Brown’s ploy of double-teaming the ball handler and made it a regular part of the defense, even though it wasn’t strictly legal. One of his biggest innovations was developing out-of-the-box isolation plays for our best shooters. That tactic didn’t exactly align with Holzman’s model of five-man offense, but it fit the Nets lineup, which was loaded with good shooters, and opened the way for new forms of creativity to flower in the years to come.

Our star player was Bernard King, an explosive small forward with a superquick release who had averaged 24.2 points and 9.5 rebounds per game as a rookie the year before. Unfortunately, he also had a substance-abuse problem. One night that season he was found asleep at the wheel at a stop sign and was arrested for drunk driving and cocaine possession. (The charges were later dropped.) This incident pushed Loughery over the edge. He was known for being good at managing self-absorbed stars, but he felt he wasn’t getting through to King and was losing control of the team. So he threatened to quit. When general manager Charlie Theokas asked Loughery to suggest a replacement, he put my name forward. I was a little stunned when I heard this, but it felt good to know that someone of Kevin’s stature thought I could handle the job. Eventually Loughery backed down. Several months later, the Nets traded King to the Utah Jazz, where he spent most of the season in rehab.

At the start of the 1979–80 season, Loughery told me that he was going to cut me from the active roster but offered me a job as a full-time assistant coach at a substantial pay cut. This was the moment I had always dreaded. I remember driving my car to the Nets’ training center in Piscataway, New Jersey, and thinking that I was never going to feel the thrill of battle again. Sure, I said to myself, I might have some high moments in the future, but unless I had to go through a life-and-death crisis of some kind, I’d probably never have another experience quite like the one I’d had as a player in the NBA.

Being a coach was not the same, or at least that was how I felt at the time. Win or lose, I’d always be one step removed from the action.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Piscataway, I found myself having an imaginary conversation with my father, who had died a few months earlier.

“What am I going to do, Dad?” I said. “Is the rest of my life going to be total drudgery, just going through the motions?”

Pause.

“How can anything else ever be as meaningful to me as playing basketball? Where am I going to find my new purpose in life?”

It would take several years for me to find the answer.

DANCES WITH BULLS

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

CHARLIE PARKER

T
his wasn’t the first time that Jerry Krause had called me about a job with the Bulls. Three years earlier, when Stan Albeck was head coach, Jerry had invited me to interview for an assistant-coach slot. I was coaching in Puerto Rico at the time and arrived in Chicago sporting a beard and dressed for the tropics. Atop my head was an Ecuadorian straw hat with a blue parrot feather sticking out of it—very fashionable (and practical) down in the islands. Albeck took one look at me and invoked his veto power. Jerry had already rejected Stan’s first choice for assistant coach, so Stan’s veto may have been payback. In any case, I didn’t get the job.

The second time around Krause advised me to lose the beard and wear a sport jacket and tie. The new head coach was Doug Collins, whom I’d played against when he was a star shooting guard for the Philadelphia 76ers. He was a smart, energetic coach whom Krause had hired to replace Albeck in 1986. Krause was looking for someone who could galvanize the Bulls’ young players into a championship-contending team—which Doug did. Johnny Bach, who knew Collins from their days with the 1972 Olympics team, said Doug reminded him of coach Adolph Rupp’s famous pronouncement that there are only two kinds of coaches: those who lead teams to victory and those who
drive
them. Doug was definitely in the second category. Although he didn’t have a deep coaching background, he had boundless energy, which he used to rev up the players for big games.

Doug and I hit it off immediately. On the ride back to my hotel after dinner with Jerry, Doug said he was looking for someone with a history of winning championships to inspire the players. Two days later Jerry offered me a job as assistant coach and gave me one more piece of fashion advice. The next time you come back to Chicago, he said, bring along your championship rings.

The Bulls were a team that was about to break loose. They still had a few holes in their lineup: Their center, Dave Corzine, was not that quick or skilled on the boards, and their six-eleven forward, Brad Sellers, had chronic injury problems. But they had a strong power forward, Charles Oakley, a solid outside shooter, John Paxson, and two promising rookie forwards, Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, whom Bach called “the Dobermans” because they were fast and aggressive enough to play smothering pressure defense.

The star, of course, was Michael Jordan, who had blossomed the previous year into the most transcendent player in the game. Not only did he win the scoring title, averaging 37.1 points per game, he also tested the limits of human performance, creating breathtaking moves in midair. The only player I knew who came close to Michael’s leaps was Julius Erving, but Dr. J didn’t have Jordan’s remarkable energy. Michael would have a great game one night and follow it with an even more mind-boggling performance the next day, then come back two days later and do it all over again.

The Bulls’ chief rivals were the Detroit Pistons, a rough, physical team that proudly referred to themselves as “the Bad Boys.” Led by point guard Isiah Thomas, the Pistons were always spoiling for a fight, and they had a team full of bruisers, including Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, Dennis Rodman, and John Salley. Early in my first season a fight broke out between Mahorn and the Bulls’ Charles Oakley that erupted into a melee. Doug Collins rushed on court to calm things down and was hurled over the scorers’ table. Johnny Bach also sprained his wrist trying to be a peacemaker. Thomas boasted later that the Pistons were “the last of the gladiator teams.”

The Pistons were a shrewd veteran team skilled at exploiting opponents’ weaknesses. With the Bulls, that meant using physical intimidation and cheap shots to get the younger, less experienced players to lose it emotionally. But that tactic didn’t work with Jordan, who wasn’t easily intimidated. To contain him, coach Chuck Daly devised a strategy called “the Jordan Rules” designed to wear Michael down by slamming him with multiple bodies whenever he had the ball. Michael was an incredibly resilient player who would often make shots with two or three players hanging on him, but the Pistons’ strategy was effective—initially, anyway—because the Bulls didn’t have many other options on offense.

My job was to travel around the country and scout the teams the Bulls would be facing in the coming weeks. This gave me a chance to see firsthand how dramatically the rivalry of Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics had transformed the NBA. Only a few years earlier the league had been in serious trouble, weighed down by drug abuse and out-of-control egos. But now it was soaring again with charismatic young stars and two of the league’s most storied franchises playing an exciting new brand of team-oriented basketball that was fun to watch.

Even more important, this job was a chance for me to go to graduate school in basketball, with two of the best minds in the game: Johnny Bach and Tex Winter. I had just spent the past five years as head coach of the Albany Patroons and had experimented with all kinds of ideas about how to make the game more equitable and collaborative, including paying all the players the same salaries one year. We won the league championship during my first season as coach, and I discovered that I had a gift for making adjustments during games and getting the most out of the talent on the roster. But after a while I realized that my biggest weakness as a coach was my lack of formal training. I hadn’t gone to Hoops U or any of the summer clinics where coaches share trade secrets. Working with Johnny and Tex was my chance to play catch-up. In the process I realized that some of the long-forgotten strategies of the past could be revitalized and made relevant for today’s game.

Bach was a master of Eastern-style basketball, the aggressive, in-your-face version of the game played east of the Mississippi. He grew up in Brooklyn and played basketball and baseball at Fordham and Brown before joining the navy and serving in the Pacific during World War II. After brief stints with the Boston Celtics and New York Yankees, he was named one of the youngest head coaches of a major college basketball team, at Fordham in 1950. Later he was successful coaching Penn State for ten years. Then he moved over to the NBA as an assistant coach and briefly served as head coach for the Golden State Warriors. In 1972, while he was an assistant coach of the U.S. Olympic team, Johnny hit it off with Collins, who played a pivotal role in the controversial gold-medal game. Doug scored the two free throws that would have won the game if an IOC official hadn’t inexplicably decided to put three seconds back on the clock after the buzzer had sounded.

Unlike Tex, Johnny didn’t subscribe to any particular system of play. He was a walking encyclopedia of basketball strategy who relied on his quick wits and photographic memory to devise creative ways to win games. When I was in the office, Johnny would often show up at my desk with dog-eared books by coaching geniuses I’d never heard of and videotapes of current NBA teams using moves invented years ago.

Once I was sitting at my VCR trying to decipher what kind of offense the Milwaukee Bucks were running, and I called Johnny over to look at the tape. He took one glance and said, “Oh, that’s Garland Pinholster’s pinwheel offense.” Then he proceeded to explain that Pinholster was one of the nation’s most innovative coaches in the fifties and sixties. He was a coach at small Oglethorpe College in Georgia and amassed a 180-68 record using the continuous-motion offense he’d invented before losing interest in basketball and going into the grocery business and state politics.

Bach, who focused primarily on defense, had a fondness for using military images and playing clips from old war movies to get the players ready for battle. One of his favorite symbols was the ace of spades, which the Marines in World War II used, according to Johnny, to honor their fallen comrades. If Johnny drew an ace of spades on the board next to an opposing player’s name, that meant the Bulls defenders were to “kill” that player whenever he had the ball.

I wasn’t as thrilled with war imagery as Johnny was, so I started using music videos (and later movie clips) during my talks. I started off with Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then moved over to David Byrne songs and Freddie Mercury’s “We Are the Champions.” Eventually I learned to use the videos to get subtle messages across. During one playoff run, I created a video with the Talking Heads’ anthem “Once in a Lifetime”—a song about the dangers of wasting the present moment.

I’ve always felt that there is a strong connection between music and basketball. The game is inherently rhythmic in nature and requires the same kind of selfless, nonverbal communication you find in the best jazz combos. Once when John Coltrane was playing in Miles Davis’s band, he went off on an interminably long solo that made Miles furious. “What the fuck?” Miles shouted.

“My axe just wouldn’t stop, brother,” Coltrane replied. “It just kept on going.”

“Well, then, put the motherfucker down.”

Steve Lacy, who played with Thelonious Monk, set down a list of Monk’s advice for the members of his combo. Here’s a selection:

• Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
  
• Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!
  
• Make the drummer sound good.
  
• Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that.
  
• Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by . . . What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.
  
• When you’re swinging, swing some more.
  
• Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
  
• You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
  

What I love about Monk’s list is his basic message about the importance of awareness, collaboration, and having clearly defined roles, which apply as much to basketball as they do to jazz. I discovered early that the best way to get players to coordinate their actions was to have them play the game in 4/4 time. The basic rule was that the player with the ball had to do something with it before the third beat: either pass, shoot, or start to dribble. When everyone is keeping time, it makes it easier to harmonize with one another, beat by beat.

The man who understood this better than anyone was Tex Winter, the other great basketball mind on the Bulls staff. Tex, an expert in free-flowing Western-style basketball, is best known for his work with the triangle offense—or triple-post offense, as he called it—which he learned playing for Coach Sam Barry at the University of Southern California. Although he didn’t invent the triangle offense, Tex expanded it with several key innovations, including creating a sequence of passes that led to coordinated movement among the players. Tex was also a gifted teacher who designed his own drills to make the players proficient in the basic actions.

When Tex was twenty-nine years old, he landed the top job at Marquette and became the youngest ever head coach of a Division I college. Two years later he took over the men’s program at Kansas State, implemented the offense, and transformed the Wildcats into an NCAA tournament regular. During that period, Jerry Krause, then a scout, befriended Tex and spent a lot of time in Manhattan, Kansas, learning basketball strategy from him. At one point Jerry told Tex that if he ever became general manager of an NBA franchise, Tex would be his first hire. Tex didn’t think anything of it at the time. Then, years later, when he was coaching at LSU, he saw a news story on ESPN about Krause being named GM of the Bulls and said to his wife, Nancy, that the next phone call he got would be from Jerry. He was right.

Ever since I started coaching in the CBA, I’d been looking for a system of offense that approximated the selfless ball movement we’d used with the championship Knicks. I played around with the flex system—a fast-moving, flowing offense popular in Argentina and Europe—but it was limited. I didn’t like the way the players had to space themselves in relation to one another and there was no way to disrupt the offense and do something else, if the situation demanded it. In contrast, the triangle not only required a high level of selflessness, but was also flexible enough to allow players a great deal of individual creativity. That suited me perfectly.

The triangle gets its name from one of its key features—a sideline triangle formed by three players on the “strong” side of the floor. But I prefer to think of the triangle as “five-man tai chi” because it involves all the players moving together in response to the way the defense positions itself. The idea is not to go head to head against the defense but to read what the defense is doing and respond accordingly. For instance, if the defense swarms Michael Jordan on one side of the floor, that opens up a series of options for the other four players. But they all need to be acutely aware of what’s happening and be coordinated enough to move together in unison so they can take advantage of the openings the defense offers. That’s where the music comes in.

When everyone is moving in harmony, it’s virtually impossible to stop them. One of the biggest converts to the triangle—eventually—was Kobe Bryant, who loved the unpredictability of the system. “Our teams were hard to play against,” Kobe says, “because the opposition didn’t know what we were going to do. Why? Because
we
didn’t know what we were going to do from moment to moment. Everybody was reading and reacting to each other. It was a great orchestra.”

There are all kinds of misconceptions about the triangle. Some critics believe that you need to have players of Michael and Kobe’s caliber to make it work. Actually, the reverse is true. The triangle wasn’t designed for the superstars, who will find ways to score no matter what system you use, but for all the other players on the team who aren’t capable of creating their own shots. It also gives every player a vital role in the offense, whether they end up shooting or not.

Another misconception is that the triangle is far too complicated for most players to learn. In fact, once you master the fundamentals, it’s far easier to learn the triangle than the more complex offenses prevalent today. The main thing you need to know is how to pass the ball and read defenses accurately. At one time most players learned these skills in high school or college, but that’s not true with many of the young players coming into the NBA now. As a result, we had to spend a lot of time teaching them how to play the game, starting with the most basic skills, from dribbling with control to footwork and passing.