New York Knicks president Phil Jackson believes Carmelo Anthony is playing the same role Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan did for his previous teams, but he thinks Anthony sometimes needs to dish the ball off faster.
"Carmelo a lot of times wants to hold the ball longer than ... we have a rule: If you hold a pass two seconds, you benefit the defense," Jackson told CBS Sports' "We Need To Talk" in a wide-ranging discussion that also covered his controversy with LeBron James and marijuana use.
"So (Anthony) has a little bit of a tendency to hold it for three, four, five seconds, and then everybody comes to a stop," Jackson added. "That is one of the things we work with. But he's adjusted."
Jackson was framing his answer to yet another question about whether Anthony fits into the triangle offense.
"He can play that role that Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant played," Jackson said. "It's a perfect spot for him to be in that isolated position on the weak side, because it's an overload offense and there's a weak-side man that always has an advantage if the ball is swung."
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It's worth pointing out that the Knicks have been running far less triangle sets under new coach Jeff Hornacek, due in part to the continued emergence of 7-foot-3 stretch big Kristaps Porzingis. By Hornacek's own admission according to ESPN's Ian Begley, the Knicks run the triangle "nowhere near 50 percent" of the time.
At this point, Jackson has become so synonymous with the venerable offense that he can't escape questions about it - even if his team isn't employing it that often. He did concede, however, that the system - like any other - is only as good as those using it.
"It's always a little bit of a pie-in-your-face type of thing to say that (the triangle offense) has been the reason for winning," Jackson said. "The reason for winning, obviously, is good players. And when good players want to play together and they join in a form or a format to play together, then really good things happen."
