To hear Phil Jackson talk before last month's NBA Draft, you could have sworn the player chosen by the New York Knicks would have been an offensive big, an ideal and heretofore-lacking fit in the team president's sacred triangle.
Of course, drafts are drafts, and other teams can and will dictate who one selects. Given their druthers, Jackson and the Knicks would have probably loved Jahlil Okafor to drop to No. 4.
Unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen.
That's not to question the team's selection of athletic Latvian seven-footer Kristaps Porzingis (whom many believe was the best pure talent in the draft) either, but some view it as the Knicks' latest step in a gradual shift away from the famed and somewhat outdated triple post offense, developed by former Jackson assistant Tex Winter and used to great success in the form of 11 NBA championships.
That's one of the takeaways from the The Wall Street Journal's Chris Herring, who reports from Knicks' summer league in Las Vegas that, at the very least, a partial de-emphasis of the triangle continues.
"The offense is going to be designed around the guys that we have," Herring quotes Knicks coach Derek Fisher as saying after the draft, when pick-and-roll players like Porzingis and Jerian Grant were selected. "The screen and roll is going to be a part of what we do, but it's not necessarily going to become something we rely on to get good shots at all times."
It should go without saying that the Porzingis pick was addtionally a clear choice of best (long-term) player available versus system fit.
Yet it also only makes sense that the pick-and-roll game, trending upwards in the NBA for more than a decade now, would seep into rigid formats elsewhere. It's a copycat league, just like going small and having mobile traditional small forwards play and defend the four.
The key of course, is always personnel. Herring points out:
The Knicks set an NBA-low 35 ball screens a game during the first month of play last season, while possessing the ball on the elbow – or the pinch post, as it’s known in the triangle – a league-high 37 times a night over that span, according to SportVU player-tracking technology. By the final month, though, New York was running almost 56 ball screens a game, essentially a league-average number, while posting just 28 elbow touches per contest.
By the end of last season, the Knicks were without their primary weapon in Carmelo Anthony, which essentially forced them into a normalization of sorts, even if his absence hurt their offense.
"(Fisher) said he wants us to run more drag screens to start plays," Grant told Herring from Vegas. "He’s been saying that we want to run, and push the ball after a miss. If we can't get that, then we can run a drag screen or go into our basic offense. But he wants us to try to control the tempo first."
The Knicks' free -gent acquisitions – specifically starters in center Robin Lopez and shooting guard Arron Afflalo – also had less to do with an offensive system first learned by Winter in the 1940s and more to do with the fundamental basketball act of defense.
Progress, one might suppose. It's unlikely Jackson will ever fully let go of the triangle, but if and when he departs the Knicks, at least there will be a Spike Lee documentary about it in MSG's time capsule.
