Shaping Up The Offense

LOS ANGELES

The Lakers can't find open shots. Kobe Bryant is harassed at every turn and can't get into the lane to break down the Celtics' defense. A team that averaged nearly 109 points per game through the regular season is lost and down 0-2 in the NBA Finals as the championship series swings here to Southern California.

You wonder if one of the men who might help the Lakers out of this mess is an 86-year-old part-time assistant who said of his role with the team: "My title is consultant, but actually I'm an insultant."

By whatever title, the man's name is Tex Winter and perhaps insulted is what the Lakers need to be facing a must win when the series resumes Tuesday night. Clearly, the Lakers' No. 1 problem is their rather weak defense, which allowed Boston to shoot 53 percent in Game 2. But it's unlikely, after a season of being defensively challenged, that the Lakers will be able to make much of an immediate improvement there. What the Lakers do at a championship level, though not in the first two games, is play offense. Yet, the Lakers aren't moving, the ball certainly isn't moving, and an offense that historically works for Phil Jackson-coached teams isn't. That can be fixed, and that's where Winter comes in.

The coaches are going to have to figure out how to get the Lakers better spaced, how to get Kobe into the lane both to shoot and create shots for his teammates, and how to get the ball quickly to Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom in the post to maximize the options Winter has taught for decades.

Winter said the other day his role is overrated, adding, "I'm dispensable." But there's too much evidence to the contrary. Jackson's Bulls and Lakers teams have won nine NBA championships, all of them playing the "triple post" or "triangle" offense Winter brought to Jackson in the late 1980s. He was supposed to, by his own admission, be working only two weeks in every month. "Yet, here I am," he said, "still getting paid after 62 years in coaching. I'm trying to phase out. I need to phase out.

"Nancy's dementia has really set in," Winter said of his wife, "and she's with me all the time. I don't want to be a distraction to the team. . . . I observe now more than I participate. I sit on the sideline and sort of critique. Phil can take it and run with it . . . or not."

Not only has Phil often run with Winter's critiques, but so did Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, so did Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. Jackson and then Jordan were initially skeptical, but they not only came to embrace the principles of the triangle but preach them. Jack Ramsay, the ESPN analyst who is one of Winter's peers and an innovator of basketball offense himself, said Winter's ability to sell Jordan on the offense is what brought the philosophy out of the shadows and into basketball prominence, particularly in the professional ranks.

Winter said the triangle "was my legacy. . . . Now it's pretty much Phil's. It was mine to leave to him, and he [has] the staff now that understands it and can teach it." But Ramsay, who led the Portland Trail Blazers to the NBA championship in 1977, said Monday on the topic of a coach allowing a lieutenant to operate with such autonomy, "For a coach to turn over his offense to an assistant, and to say so publicly, is extraordinary."

What Jackson, Winter and the other Lakers assistants will need to figure out over the three games in Los Angeles is how to free Bryant from defenders more frequently. Winter said the offense has to "evolve because opposing defenses are taking some options away [because they've played against it so much the last 20-plus years]. But that doesn't matter. . . . We'll find something else from reading the defense to use successfully." Winter uttered that last line not boastfully, but as if it was a matter of fact, probably because it has been.

Ramsay said: "It's not just the system. There are flaws in the system. It's a jump-shot offense. It doesn't really allow for open-court driving to the basket. And there are a lot of coaches who have tried it and failed at it. Jim Cleamons [on Jackson's staff in Chicago and now in Los Angeles] tried it in Dallas and it didn't work. Cotton Fitzsimmons tried it in Phoenix one year . . . and didn't get out of preseason. He junked it. In Portland, what we ran was similar. The operation of the true triangle is that anybody can go into the post, and I said, 'No, Bill Walton will go into the post.' When it's going, yes, it's so beautiful. But so is any offense when it's executed properly. The thing is, Phil has always had a player, that when you're not getting the shots you want from the triangle, that player can get his own shot."

Will Perdue, who played center on three championship Bulls teams and now works as a radio analyst on NBA games, made pretty much the same observation. "The offense is very good. But you have to have a guy who can generate his own shot late in the shot clock, and that's the bailout. Tex doesn't like to hear that, because you're not supposed to get to that point in the shot clock. . . . But if you do, you have to have that guy who in a spread floor can get his own shot."

But if Bryant can't get his own shot, then the triangle might have to be tweaked or "expanded" to use Ramsay's word. Some players understand how it maximizes their talents. Shaq was disciplined and never shot quickly out of the post position, Ramsay said, because he knew ball and player movement would produce a better shot. Scottie Pippen, Ramsay said, "extracted all the benefits from it." Most coaches and players who understand the principles and intricacies of the offense believe these Lakers, when Kobe is off the floor, run the triangle in a textbook manner. They have to. And they'll need to since the role players need to produce in Los Angeles the way, say, Celtics reserve Leon Powe did (21 points in fewer than 15 minutes) off the bench in Boston in Game 2.

That's not going to happen because players just decide to play harder. It's Jackson, with Winter's assistance, who can remind the Lakers that proper spacing will make it much harder to double-team the man with the ball, that Kobe, if he's having trouble taking the Celtics off the dribble, can take the ball in the post and initiate the offense, which in the process will involve his teammates more.

Since only three of 29 teams have come back from being down 0-2 to win the championship series, the Lakers are presumably in a state of alert, receptive to anything and everything their coaches might suggest. It would be quite an accomplishment for Winter, at the age of 86 with most of his basketball life in his rear-view mirror, to be able to assist such a comeback.