Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  Discord on the coaching staff mounted to the point that Collins blocked Winter from coming to practice during the 1988-89 season. “Tex was basically out of the picture at that time,” Jackson recalled. “He did some scouting for Jerry Krause and took some road trips. He didn’t go on all of our game trips. When he was with us, he sat in a corner and kept notes on practice and didn’t participate in the coaching. He was out of it.”

  “I was upset,” Krause once admitted, “because Doug basically wasn’t listening to Tex, and he wasn’t listening to Phil Jackson. Doug did a great job for us for a couple or years. He took the heat off me from a public relations standpoint. Doug was great with the media. But he learned to coach on the fly, and he didn’t listen to his assistants as much as he should have. Doug had a thing with Phil, too. As time went on, he was like Stan in that he got away from what we wanted to do.”

  The Bulls made it all the way to the conference finals before losing to the Detroit Pistons that season, but in the aftermath Krause decided to fire Collins and promote Jackson. “We brought Doug into the office,” Krause once recalled, “and I think Doug thought he was going to talk about a contract extension. He had his agent with him. I said, ‘Doug, we’re going to have to let you go.’ The look on his face was shocking. We had our conversation with him, and I called Phil, who was fishing out in Montana. I told him, ‘I just let Doug go.’ He said, ‘What!?!?’ And I said, ‘Doug’s gone, and I want you to be the head coach. You need to get your ass in here on a flight today. Soon as you can. I got to talk to you.’ I brought Phil in and we talked philosophy. The first thing he said was, ‘I’ve always been a defensive oriented guy, as a player with Red Holtzman, and as a coach. That’s what you want me for?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I’m going to turn the offense over to Tex, and I’m going to run the triple-post.’

  “I think some people who know me thought that I had set that all up, that I’d brought Phil in because he’d run Tex’s stuff,” Krause said. “I wish I’d been that smart, but I wasn’t. It was all his idea. But I said, ‘Great. That’s super.’ Because I knew the damn stuff would work. But I couldn’t impose that on Doug. You couldn’t impose anything on Doug. I would never impose what a coach runs on them anyway.”

  Without question, Winter said, it was the rise of Jackson to the position of head coach that made the use of his triangle offense possible. It was not, however, an easy transition.

  Winter had spent years developing the triangle, or triple-post offense. It was an old college system that involved all five players sharing the ball and moving. But it was totally foreign to the pro players of the 1990s, and many of them found it difficult to learn. Where for years the pro game had worked on isolation plays and one-on-one set ups, the triple-post used very little in the way of set plays. Instead the players learned to react to situations and to allow their ball movement to create weaknesses in defenses.

  Among the offenses strongest questioners was Jordan.

  “I’ve always been very much impressed with Michael as well as everyone else has been,” Winter once explained. “I’ve never been a hero worshipper. I saw his strong points, but I also saw some weaknesses. I felt like there was a lot of things that we could do as a coaching staff to blend Michael in with the team a little bit better. I thought he was a great player, but I did not feel that we wanted to go with him exclusively. We wanted to try and get him to involve his teammates more. Until he was convinced that that was what he wanted to do, I don’t think we had the chance to have the program that we had later down the line.”

  “Tex’s offense emulated the offense I had played in with New York,” Jackson said. “The ball dropped into the post a lot. You ran cuts. You did things off the ball. People were cutting and passing and moving the basketball. And it took the focus away from Michael, who had the ball in his hands a lot, who had been a great scorer. That had made the defenses all turn and face him. Suddenly he was on the back side of the defenses, and Michael saw the value in having an offense like that. He’d been in an offense like that at North Carolina. It didn’t happen all at once. He started to see that over a period of time, as the concepts built up.”

  “It was different for different types of players,” recalled former Bulls guard John Paxson. “For me it was great. A system offense is made for someone who doesn’t have the athletic skills that a lot of guys in the league have. It played to my strengths. But it tightened the reins on guys like Michael and Scottie from the standpoint that we stopped coming down and isolating them on the side. There were subtleties involved, teamwork involved. But that was the job of Phil to sell us on the fact we could win playing that way.”

  “Everything was geared toward the middle, toward the post play,” Jordan said, explaining his opposition. “We were totally changing our outlook … and I disagreed with that to a certain extent. I felt that was putting too much pressure on the people inside.”

  “What Michael had trouble with,” Jackson said, “was when the ball went to one of the big guys like Bill Cartwright or Horace Grant or some of the other players who weren’t tuned in to handling and passing the ball. They now had the ball. Could they be counted on to make the right passes, the right choices? I brought Michael in my office and told him basically, ‘The ball is like a spotlight. And when it’s in your hands, the spotlight is on you. And you’ve gotta share that spotlight with some of your teammates by having them do things with the basketball, too.’ He said, ‘I know that. It’s just that when it comes down to getting the job done, a lot of times they don’t want to take the initiative. Sometimes it’s up to me to take it, and sometimes that’s a tough balance.’

  “All along the way it was a compromise of efforts,” Jackson said. “Everybody made such a big issue of the triple-post offense. We just said, ‘It’s a format out of which to play. You can play any way you want out of the triangle.’ Because if it’s a sound offense, you should be able to do that. One of the concepts is to hit the open man.”

  Jordan’s presence also stretched the flexibility of Winter’s concepts and challenged the older coach’s thinking. “There were times when Michael knew he was going to get 40 points,” Jackson said. “He was just hot those nights. He was going to go on his own, and he would just take over a ball game. We had to understand that that was just part of his magnitude, that was something he could do that nobody else in this game could do. And it was going to be okay. Those weren’t always the easiest nights for us to win as a team. But they were certainly spectacular nights for him as a showman and a scorer.”

  “It took some time,” Paxson recalled. “Michael was out there playing with these guys, and unless he had a great deal of respect for them as players, I think he figured, ‘Why should I pass them the ball when I have the ability to score myself or do the job myself? I’d rather rely on myself to succeed or fail than some of these other guys.’ The thing I like about Michael is that he finally came to understand that if we were going to win championships he had to make some sacrifices individually. He had to go about the task of involving his teammates more.”

  “A lot of times,” Jackson said, “my convincing story to Michael was, ‘We want you to get your thirty-some points, and we want you to do whatever is necessary. It’s great for us if you get 12 or 14 points by halftime, and you have 18 points at the end of the third quarter. Then get your 14 or 18 points in the fourth quarter. That’s great. If it works out that way, that’s exactly what it’ll be.’ Who could argue with that? We’d tell him, ‘Just play your cards. Make them play everybody during the course of the game and then finish it out for us.’ I think that’s why sometimes Michael has downplayed the triangle. He says it’s a good offense for three quarters, but it’s not great for the fourth quarter. That’s because he took over in the fourth quarter. He can perform.”

  “Phil was definitely set on what we were going to do and he wouldn’t waiver,” Winter recalled. “Even though the triple-p
ost offense evolved through my many, many years of coaching, Phil was sold on it even more than I was at times. There’s times when I would say, ‘We should get away from this. Let Michael have more one-on-one opportunities.’ And Phil was persistent in not doing so. It’s to his credit that we stayed to his basic philosophy of basketball.”

  The team’s effort with the offense intensified over the early months of the 1990-91 season, and by February the players and Jordan clicked in their understanding, which resulted in impressive displays of execution. They finished that February with an 11-1 record that included a host of road wins during a West Coast trip. “We had been on the road for something like two weeks,” Jordan recalled, “and it just came together. I could feel it then.”

  “I remember we were on a West Coast swing before we really started kicking it in and getting some really nice action off of it,” recalled Bill Cartwright. “It was fun. People started seeing that. We were getting dunks and wide-open jump shots. But before that, it took a lot of time and patience for us to grow.”

  The Bulls won the Eastern Conference with a 61-21 record in 1991, and Jordan claimed his fifth straight scoring title with a 31.5 average. During the playoffs, he was named the league’s MVP for the second time. Best of all, the Bulls won the first of their titles, soon to be followed by two more consecutive championships.

  “It may sound sort of self-serving,” Winter said, “but I think the offense has very definitely been one of the Chicago Bulls’ strengths. Because the program has perpetuated itself. Even when Jordan left us, I think people were amazed—and we were too—that we could win 55 games.”

  Jordan had never discussed the offense with Winter, and had never acknowledged its importance. When the superstar returned to the Bulls in 1995 after his 18-month retirement, both he and the team struggled in the playoffs that spring, leading to speculation among the media that perhaps it was time for Chicago to find a new offensive system. Even Winter himself had doubts. In the wake of the loss to Orlando in the 1995 playoffs, Winter pushed Jackson to discuss the issue with Jordan in the season-ending conference Jackson held privately with each player.

  “With his impulsiveness, Tex said, ‘Phil, I’d like you to ask him, does he think we need to change the offense,’” Jackson recalled. “‘Is it something we should plan on using next year? I want you to ask him just for me.’ So I did, and Michael said, ‘The triple-post offense is the backbone of this team. It’s our system, something that everybody can hang their hat on, so that they can know where to go and how to operate.’”

  Indeed, the offense played a key role in Chicago’s success for the next two seasons, but that didn’t mean the debate ended. If anything, the issue seemed to become more pronounced with the passing of each NBA season.

  In 1958, Winter’s Kansas State team defeated Wilt Chamberlain and the Kansas Jayhawks in the Big Eight Conference tournament, preventing the dominant giant from returning to the NCAA tournament his junior season. Chamberlain was so disappointed by the loss that he withdrew from school and spent a year touring with the Harlem Globetrotters.

  Decades later, Winter would joke facetiously that he “drove” Chamberlain from the college game. Still, his team’s victory over Kansas in the basketball-crazy Midwest was one of the great upsets of that era. In some ways, the success of his team play against the individual brilliance of Chamberlain was a theme that still resonated every game night for the Chicago Bulls. There was Jordan’s individual mastery, and there was Winter, extolling his triangle offense and the purity of team play. Their careers had evolved to a nightly give-and-take on the issue.

  “It’s a balancing act, is what it is,” Winter said in 1998. “Every game is a thin line, it’s a thin line as to how much freedom you want to give a player who has as much talent as Michael has. And how much do you want him to sacrifice his own individual talents to score to involve his teammates more?”

  Asked if Jordan and his coaches ever actually debated the issue, Winter replied, “I think he understands, but Michael wants to score when he touches the ball. And he feels like he’s got the ability to. So, consequently why should he give up the ball? He probably doesn’t have the trust in a lot of his teammates he should. He’d rather put it on his own shoulders to bare that load.”

  Jordan’s teammates often felt that lack of trust, Winter said. In fact, Jackson’s film sessions and post-season preachings about togetherness were often meant primarily for Jordan, Winter said. “Michael understands. He’s a very smart basketball player. It’s just that he’s such a competitor that he likes challenges. And when he catches that ball, if he feels like he can, he’s gonna try to score. And often times he does. Even when he goes one on one, most of it comes out of the concept of the offense. He’s not going off on his own and completely abandoning our principles. We won’t let him do that.”

  If Jordan’s competitiveness raged to the point that he bordered on killing chemistry, Jackson would usually caution him that he was trying to do too much. “That’s usually about all it takes,” Winter said. “Phil will remind him to involve his teammates. Phil will let him know that he missed a teammate that was open. He’ll penetrate, for example, to the middle, and Kerr’s man will fly in to attack him. And Kerr’s wide open, and Michael may try to beat the two people rather than hit Kerr.”

  The triangle offense was still the apparatus that provided for the ball movement necessary to defuse Jordan’s competitiveness when it reached toxic levels. As Jordan book collaborator Mark Vancil pointed out, most fans would have never heard of the triangle offense if not for Jordan’s individual mastery. That certainly was true. On the other hand, there was a strong argument that Jordan would never have realized his potential as the leader of a championship team if he hadn’t molded his game to fit within Winter’s team approach.

  Jackson synthesized the argument. Oftentimes the team struggled in executing the offense, he pointed out, but “we were still philosophically in tune with one another because of it. And it shows.

  “A lot of times,” Jackson said, “it’s all right to say from a coaching standpoint, ‘You know we executed offensively in these games, and it’s really a matter great function of the team.’ But the reality is that the triangle offense works great because Michael Jordan has an ability to move between five different positions and sail by double-teams and knows how to function in this thing so that he can always bail out the offense in the last five seconds. That’s made it really a great offense for a superstar.”

  The Bulls would often use the offense for the first 20 seconds of a possession, then turn the ball over to Jordan to execute one-on-one moves as the shot clock wound down. The friction between the individual and the system brought still more innovation. But there was little question that Winter had been one of the people to stand up to Jordan, the result of which was Jordan’s begrudging respect. It hadn’t been earned without a price.

  “Michael’s sort of his own man,” Winter explained in 1995. “I think he’s talked to Phil occasionally about what we do offensively and how he fits into the scheme of things. I let Phil handle that. My basic job is of teacher. When we step out on that floor at a practice session, I’m going to coach whoever shows up. And I’m going to coach them the way I coach, whether it’s Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, or whoever it is. It doesn’t make any difference. They know that. If I see Michael making a mistake, I’ll correct him as fast as I will anyone else. On the other hand, he’s such a great athlete you have to handle him a little differently than you do the other players. I don’t think you can come down on him hard in a very critical way, whereas some younger guy or some other guy you feel you might be able to motivate by coming down on them pretty tough.”

  Winter pointed out in 1998 that only in the last few seasons had Jordan himself actually gotten the real hang of the chest pass. The coach added that he didn’t think Scottie Pippen would ever quite get the technique down. “There�
�s something with Pippen’s wrist,” Winter said. “He just throw a correct chest pass.”

  Told this comment later, Jordan smiled. “I have tremendous respect for Tex Winter,” he said. “His nitpicking over the years has been important in the building up of my game. I couldn’t have been as fundamentally sound without him.”

  The use of the word “nitpicking” gave the compliment Jordan’s trademark backhanded edge. “He’s appreciative of the little things,” Winter said, “but at the same time, even though he says that, he still has a hard time being a real fundamental basketball player. He accepts the coaching, but he just doesn’t play that way. He’s more of a high-wire act, you know. He’s into degree of difficulty instead of just working, just trying to be real fundamentally sound. You can’t fault him for that because that’s one of the reasons he’s been effective. I think he’s more appreciative now of the basic fundamental skills necessary to make our offense function than he was earlier.”

  Still, you didn’t have to spend much time around the Bulls to sense the underlying conflict between player and coach. Sometimes it surfaced in strange ways.

  For example, during the 1996 playoffs Jordan walked out of the training room and into the Chicago Bulls locker room at the United Center and stopped suddenly. There, sitting in Jordan’s locker space was Winter, quietly conducting a pre-game interview with a reporter.

  Apparently annoyed that someone was sitting in his locker space before a game, Jordan eyed Winter, then turned and walked a few steps to the center of the locker room, where he paused and turned back around.

  “Tex, you want this?” Jordan said gruffly, holding up the shoe box that had held his brand new pair of Air Jordans for the evening. Jordan knew Winter would want the box. Winter wanted everything. If he passed a drink machine, he instinctively reached into the change receptacle to see if anyone had left a little silver. Some days after practice, when the reporters cleared out of the Berto Center, Winter would venture down to the press room to pick up any newspapers left there so that he could read them without having to buy his own.