Is triangle still relevant?

IS the triangle offense still relevant in today’s basketball scene?
Modern-day basketball, at least in the sport’s flagship league National Basketball Association, is slowly devaluing the importance of the big men in the middle – the traditional dinosaurs that were the alpha dogs of their teams during the halcyon days of George Mikan, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Nate Thurmond Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal and even David Robinson – and turning to a small-ball realignment that has been magnified by the success the Golden State Warriors, who romped away with the NBA crown for a second time in three years during the 2017 playoffs.
In recent times, much emphasis has been placed on ball movement and teams have relied on the motion offense to ignite their shooting strategies.
In the NBA, the triangle offense appears to be on the way out as its success is becoming a myth without a team with the right player personnel to implement.
Phil Jackson, who while employing the triangle won a league-leading 11 championships in the 1990s and 2000s as the top bench tactician of the Chicago Bulls (six) and Los Angeles Lakers (five), imposed the offensive strategy on the woebegone New York Knicks team during his three-year stint as (2014-17) as the club’s president with disastrous results as the Gotham City outfit posted a combined 80-166 record (17-65/32-50/31-51) under Derek Fisher (1.5 seasons), Kurt Rambis (.5) and current head mentor Jeff Hornacek (2016-17).
What exactly is the triangle offense? Known also as the triple post or sideline triangle, the triangle offense is an offensive strategy in basketball.
Its basic concepts actually were formulated more than seven decades ago by former college coach Sam Barry at the University of Southern California.
Barry introduced the triangle offense where players stand in triangular positions on either side of the basketball court to create good spacing between players and alow each one to pass to four teammates.
Barry’s initial setup employed the simple triangulation setup of the center, who stands at the low post; a forward, who is at the wing; and a guard, who is at the corner, on one side of the court.
At the other side of this five-player system are the off guard, who stands up at the top of the key, and the “weaker” forward, who is on the weak-side high post.
Barry, who was enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1978, ran his version of the triangle with a stocky guard named Tex Winter.
When Winter became the head coach at Kansas State University in 1953, he brought Barry’s TO and even made it more complicated with different strategies involving various advantageous moves.
Winter subsequently immortalized the triangle offense by writing the book “Triple-Post Offense” in 1962 while at KSU.
Winter hooked up with the Houston Rockets in the NBA in 1971-72 as their head coach. But after only one and a half seasons at the Rockets helm, he returned to the collegiate coaching ranks.
Winter did not go back into the NBA until 1985 when he served as an assistant to head coaches Stan Albeck and Doug Collins while with the Chicago Bulls. Through the following years, Winter continued to make refinements on the triangle offense. When Phil Jackson took over the Bulls’ head mentoring reins in 1989, he not only installed the offensive strategy full time but also gave it much prominence.
Jackson hired Winter as one of his assistant coaches during his nine-year stay (1989-98) in Windy City and when the Zen Master joined the Los Angeles Lakers organization in 1999, he also brought along Winter as an assistant. In the next five seasons, the Lakers advanced to the NBA Finals on four occasions and earned three titles along the way behind Shaq and Kobe Bryant.
Following a one-year sabbatical (2004-05), Jackson returned to the Lakers in 2005-06 and he again sought the services of Winter. The Lakers returned to prominence with back-to-back championships in 2009 and 2010 behind Bryant and big man Pau Gasol.
Jackson’s offensive philosophy undoubtedly was greatly influenced by his long association with Winter.
The 95-year-old Winter was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2011 under the “contributor’ category.