Kobe Bryant has done an amazing job behind the scenes reviving his sorely battered Los Angeles Lakers teammates to get them ready to compete for this year’s championship.
Most people don’t understand the huge challenge of that job following the team’s devastating loss to the Boston Celtics in last year’s championship series.
That’s the opinion of Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw, who has spent years working with Bryant and observing his unrivaled work ethic.
Bryant has long been inhuman in his efforts to make himself a great player. Shaw has spoken admiringly of the studying, the conditioning, the practicing, all part of the intense amount of effort Bryant has put into his own game.
“He still has all that discipline, all that attention to detail,” Shaw said.
But over the past year Bryant has turned a similar effort into building his team and teammates, Shaw explained recently.
“The area he has grown in the most has been his leadership and his trust of the other players on the team now. He has complete trust. He’s more open with them than he’s been with any group that we’ve had here in Los Angeles to this point. That is why we’re here in the Finals.”
Shaw said people don’t understand the tremendous effort and leadership it has taken by Bryant to help the Lakers recover from their embarrassment at the hands of the Celtics last year.
“He manned up,” Shaw said of Bryant. “He said at the end of the Boston series last year that they were the better team. They were tougher. They were more physical.”
Bryant told his teammates that they all — including himself — needed to become physically and mentally stronger, according to Shaw.
“Kobe said, ‘We can’t make guys tough that aren’t tough. But they can physically prepare themselves, and we can cover for each other’s weaknesses.’ And that’s what we focused on. That’s something he made a point of saying.”
Once the season started, Bryant showed a newfound ability to measure the team.
“He’s done a good job all year of gauging things when our team comes out in a game and we’re a little sluggish. He’s more aggressive then to get us into a game. If guys are up to the task right at the beginning, then he defers. He’ll set guys up and play more of a facilitator role. Then we always know that we can go to him in the fourth quarter and get what we need.”
Bryant’s tremendous determination helps explain his difficulty in Game 3 of this year’s Finals against Orlando. The Magic opened the game with torrid shooting, and because Bryant is so determined to close out this championship, he answered with his own scoring outburst in the first half that kept the Lakers in the game.
However, he may have worn himself down, which helps explain his struggles and the key late turnover that cost the Lakers in the fourth quarter. Bryant also showed signs of extreme fatigue in the Lakers conference finals battle with Denver.
Jerry West saw this scenario developing months ago, after Bryant played for Team USA in the Olympic Games last summer, after having carried the Lakers through the long march to the 2008 Finals.
As a former Laker vice president and the man who acquired Bryant as a 17-year-old rookie, then mentored him to stardom, West began expressing concern to associates about the heavy burden the team’s star was carrying.
Speaking privately to a member of Phil Jackson’s staff, West fussed about the wear and tear on Bryant and the need for the team to be vigilant about leaning so heavily on him. West has observed that the time that Bryant gets on the bench each game to rejuvenate is critical at this stage of his career.
The coaching staff has been vigilant about the issue this season, Shaw said, but added that it’s difficult because of Bryant’s great competitive nature. In Game 3, Lakers coach Phil Jackson left Bryant on the bench for a stretch of the fourth quarter in hopes he could recuperate.
“He always wants to stay in the game,” Shaw said. “As a coach, you have to give him rests. You have to protect him from himself. There are times when he’s really pleading on the sideline, ‘Leave me in. Leave me in.’ We do that, but for the most part you have to fight that and give him rests.”
Managing Bryant’s minutes and trying to pace his tremendous competitiveness will be a key to the remainder of the championship series, which resumes Thursday night with Game 4 in Orlando.
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West raised hackles and eyebrows recently when he announced that LeBron James had supplanted Bryant as the best player in the NBA.
On one level, West was simply doing something he’s been paid to do for the last thirty years — he was stating the obvious about the talent he observed on the court.
James is simply bigger and stronger and more powerful than Bryant, and as a result, can do more things on the court than Bryant.
West is quite familiar with the circumstances. He himself spent his entire career being compared with the bigger, stronger presence of Oscar Robertson. In fact, West was more than a little obsessed with these comparisons and used them to drive and motivate himself.
Robertson could do more on the court, and as a result, he won many of the comparison battles, especially those made by West himself. West often said Robertson was better, although those who worked with West said he spent his career determined to outdo his rival.
Even in retirement, Robertson still chaffs at these comparisons, by the way. He has been known to grow angry at writers even making the comparisons. However, Robertson can be excused for not getting the fun. He came along in an age of unfathomable racism.
But West has long known that these comparisons are never truly resolved, that they are the lifeblood of an NBA career, that they drive fan interest and player performance. If you don’t believe him, ask Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, who spent their careers locked in a competition that drove both to the heights of the game.
Is James better than Bryant?
West also made this observation: You can see what a player can do on the floor, his physical abilities, but it’s almost impossible to read a player’s heart.
This much is clear about Bryant: At age 30, in the NBA championship series, he’s determined to make the full effort, leaving nothing undone.
So heart is not an issue.
Asked about Bryant’s turnover at the key moment of Game 3, Jackson observed afterward that the star is only human.
Jackson’s longtime mentor, Tex Winter, liked to point out that Bryant and Michael Jordan possessed a similar competitive nature that made each game an adventure.
Would they try to do too much by themselves, or would they find the right balance to help their teams win?
That was first the central drama of Jordan’s career, just as it’s now the central drama of Bryant’s career — and the central issue of these NBA Finals.
Tex Winter is back in Oregon now, after having spent weeks in Kansas following a late April stroke.
Craig Hodges, who played for Winter at Long Beach State and with the Chicago Bulls and who now coaches with him as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers staff, keeps in close touch with Winter’s family.
The 87-year-old Winter, who developed the Lakers’ famed triangle offense, still struggles with leg movement and trying to speak, Hodges said, but he’s pretty sure Winter is watching the Lakers in the playoffs on television.
If so, you have to be worried about Winter, who has a tendency toward frustration with the Lakers’ play and vociferous criticism of their performances.
Even though the team played extremely well in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals against the Denver Nuggets and followed that up with superb play against the Orlando Magic in Game 1 of the NBA championship series, Winter wouldn’t have allowed himself to be very pleased.
“He would have found something to yell at us about,” said the Lakers Luke Walton with a smile.
Winter has always been that sort of perfectionist.
He has teamed with Lakers head coach Phil Jackson over the past two decades to dominate as pro basketball’s odd couple. When they met as assistant coaches on the Chicago Bulls coaching staff in the late 1980s, Winter was the quirky genius of basketball, a superb college coach who was never quite able to sell his ideas to pro players, and Jackson was the strange duck outsider, lacking a deep technical understanding of the sport.
Sure Jackson had won an NBA championship as a sub for the 1973 New York Knicks and a Continental Basketball Association title as a coach of the Albany Patroons. But his coaching contemporaries in the CBA liked to joke behind his back that Jackson had trouble understanding a simple flex offense.
Together, though, Winter and Jackson would make for a masterful team. Even then, in his late sixties, Winter was a revolutionary, so fiery that Bulls head coach Doug Collins had to ban him from practice. The Bulls, however, soon fired Collins, promoted Jackson, and the triangle conspiracy was off and running.
Jackson was the student, with Winter teaching him over the years during film sessions, organizing his practices, explaining all the details. Jackson soaked it all up, and then provided that special touch of genius that Winter lacked — a masterful ability at team dynamics and group building.
Winter often said the triangle would never have gone far in the NBA without Jackson’s ability to elevate it to relevance and sell it to the players, especially superstars such as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
Within two years, they helped guide Jordan, Scottie Pippen and the Bulls to their first title. They would win five more over the course of the 1990s and would eventually come close to Winter’s ideal of the perfect offensive state.
That would be what Winter called “the automatics,” a state where the coaches didn’t have to call plays because the players were so well versed in the triangle offense they could simply read the defense and make the cuts and passes to counteract it.
With Jordan, Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Ron Harper and a host of smart role players, the Bulls came to inhabit that rare state for their last three championships, from 1996-98. They spread the floor, ran their “automatics,” and left the rest of the league dazed and confused.
These elevated states of play and Jackson’s Eastern and mystical leanings helped cast them as purveyors of a “Zen” basketball. But then the Bulls broke up in a contentious storm, and Jackson/Winter soon found their way to L.A.
Surprise, surprise, they won three more championships from 2000-2002 with Shaquille O’Neal and Bryant, but those Lakers teams did so mostly with a mix of Shaq’s blunt force trauma and just enough triangle offense to keep opponents off balance. Then for the second time, one of Jackson’s championship teams came apart in a fury of spite and ego.
O’Neal was traded, and Jackson was fired, then rehired in 2005. He, Winter, and the fine Lakers staff have spent the ensuing seasons rebuilding that triangle mind among their players.
Why has it taken so long for Jackson’s latest Lakers teams to reach that higher level? “It’s a different generation of players,” explained Hodges, who played on Winter’s college team at Long Beach State, where his college players had the practice time to learn full execution of the offense. In the pro game with its heavy schedule and many distractions, it simply takes longer to teach and learn it.
After falling apart in the 2008 championship series against the Boston Celtics, the Lakers are back at it, but now for the first time in more than a decade, one of Jackson’s teams has reached that special level. You almost have to use a word that has become trivial, but the Lakers are playing Zen basketball, in a special state with Winter’s “automatics.”
He scored them largely in the broad, discombobulating context of the triangle offense. The Lakers went to their “automatics,” and simply took what the defense gave them. From the 25-point final margin, it’s easy to deduce that Orlando was quite charitable. Afterward, the Magic players and coaches had the look that Bulls opponents had in the late 1990s.
As veteran Magic assistant Brendan Malone suggested before Game 1, Orlando would counter the triangle by slowing the flow of Lakers cutting to the basket.
“We have to keep a body on the cutters,” he explained.
It made great sense, especially against a young team that couldn’t use all of the “automatics” of the triangle offense. But as Walton explained, this Lakers team has been growing in its relationship with the complicated offense, and now they’re able to make the many reads the offense required. They’re now able to employ all of the automatics.
“It’s been a constant change,” Walton explained, “but toward the end of that Denver series, that’s when we really took a step to the next level.”
The players, he said, have come “to know that pretty much every time, if we make the right reads, we’re gonna get a good shot.”
Being on the floor in those Zen moments makes for a rare and wonderful level of basketball, Walton observed. “If you have the ball, you’re looking around and seeing people move and cut. It’s a great way to play basketball.”
It’s a matter the Lakers going to their first option and waiting for the defense to counter it, then turning to their automatics, Walton explained. “The thing about our automatics, we’re running them because the defense is taking something away from us. There’s no way you can take away our first option and our automatics at the same time. The automatics are pressure-release situations. So if you’re gonna take away something, we read it and go to something else. We normally have the court spread out and people cutting all the time.
“This offense is meant to not even call any plays, just move the ball, and depending on how the defense is guarding you, you make the appropriate pass. Off of every pass, there’s another five options to go from,” Walton added. “We got a group of guys out there right now where it’s starting to click for us. We’re constantly moving and getting open shots.”
It makes basketball very Zen and very fun, agreed teammate Sasha Vujacic. “When we were still learning about the offense, we didn’t know what to do with pressure.”
Winter devised the triangle to take a defense’s pressure and use it against them, which is what the Lakers are now doing to their opponents. In Jackson, the perfectionist Winter found a tremendously patient and wonderful teacher to explain the offense over long periods of time to those pro players willing and eager to learn it.
“The triangle is a two-guard front, so it’s a little bit different and difficult to learn,” Vujacic explained. “But the coaching staff has explained it step by step, and it has become easier. To learn triangle takes a while. Once you finally learn it, it goes smoothly. There are just so many options.”
It takes special players to fit the system, Walton suggested. “They’ve done a great job of putting this team together.”
No player in the world understands the offense better than Bryant, a Winter disciple who joins the coaching staff in teaching it to the team. “It helps everybody else,” Vujacic explained. “When we play as a team we are very hard to beat. That’s when Kobe takes over. He knows when to take shots and when to pass. He’s just the best there is in the game.”
Bryant’s uncommon work ethic has been a big factor in driving this learning experience with the automatics, as assistant coach Brian Shaw, himself a veteran of the offense, explained. “He’s done a good job of balancing when to be aggressive and when to be a facilitator.”
What the defense gave was a lot of opportunity for Bryant to run the side screen and roll, which he used to burn Orlando time and again. Having coached against Winter for years, Malone likes to argue that the screen and roll really isn’t the triangle, but Winter has long been adamant that screen and roll action is just one of the options his players have in making their reads. “Kobe killed us with it,” Malone said.
Does this mean that the Magic players and staff have no hope, that whatever Orlando does, the Lakers will simply read the situation and take what’s left?
Not necessarily. There’s always the human element. Sometimes the Lakers lose the patience that Zen requires.
“It’s just in some games we don’t do it,” Walton said, pausing a moment to contemplate that mystery. “Some games we try to force it in (against the defensive pressure). That’s when we struggle.”
Those have always been the moments that left Winter fussing about the overbearing elements of Bryant’s or Jordan’s competitive nature.
“When we’re willing to accept to what’s open, it works well,” Walton explained. “If they jam cutters, we kick it to the other side and counter back in, and now they’re playing at a deficit.”
That’s the brilliance of Winter’s triangle offense, that it creates an imbalance, then swings the ball to the weak side, where a Bryant or Jordan can play behind the defense and then take advantage.
As they work to win Jackson’s tenth title, the Lakers are quite mindful of Winter’s condition, and that may factor into their determination to reach that special level with the automatics. As you might expect, they don’t articulate such notions. They’re better left unsaid.
Jackson, though, has been hurt deeply by Winter’s condition, according to close associates. It’s not something the coach is going to talk about publicly, and he addresses it only subtly with his team. “He’s constantly teaching us and telling us things his teacher has told him,” Walton said of Jackson. “We’re all thinking about Tex, and we miss him.”
For Phil Jackson, endings have always been much more powerful than beginnings.
But what would you expect from a guy who was raised by two itinerant fundamentalist preachers? Jackson grew up a son of the Northern Plains, in one Montana community after another, always facing “the rapture,” the belief that the world was soon coming to its glorious end.
“Every Sunday since I was born, the apocalypse has been coming next year,” Jackson once told Knicks teammate Bill Bradley in trying to explain his parents’ view of life. Jackson’s young world would be shaped by a growing awareness of his mother’s intense devotion and her focus on the moment of Christ’s return, what she called “the rapture of the saints,” and he would spend his childhood years anticipating that rapture.
Those childhood experiences brought him moments of terror, he once revealed.
And so he learned the power of endings. Anyone who doubts that only has to recall how he used the “end game” to motivate and focus a crazily fractured and distracted Chicago Bulls team to win the 1998 NBA championship. Jackson employed every mind game possible to squeeze a sixth title out of that club and even gave it a tagline as he was doing it, “The Last Dance.”
Hey, he’s a guy who’s made millions off a book titled “The Last Season.”
So Jackson’s recent noise about retiring after the 2010 campaign has to be taken with a grain of context. And that context is this: With Phillip Douglas Jackson you never know where the mind games end and the stark reality begins. That’s part of his motivational success in a business where you’re trying to shape, guide and control headstrong young millionaires in short pants.
We do know this fact. Tex Winter has worked with Jackson closely for years. He’s the guy’s mentor. Winter says that he’s never seen Phil tighten down the control like he has this season.
That, of course, has everything to do with the fact that he’s trying to push a talented young team to a championship, a talented young team that had its mental fragility exposed last year against the Boston Celtics.
It wasn’t easy for Jackson growing up with the isolation of being a son of the Holy Rollers, those folks who worshipped in tents and talked in tongues and based their lives on the notion that the world was going to end any day. But that experience is just one of many things in Jackson’s powerful bag of tricks, things that he has drawn upon over the course of his masterful career.
When Jackson coached the Bulls, some people in that organization chafed at things that he did, as have other coaches around the league. There’s the perception that he’s supremely arrogant.
But as one Bulls official once told me, “If you’re going to coach Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen you better have some shit with you.”
Jackson has always had some shit with him.
Maybe he is planning to retire. Maybe he isn’t. Only Phil knows. And maybe even he doesn’t know.
But we all know this: nothing in life is guaranteed. The opportunity for the Lakers to win is now. The sense of urgency must be huge.
That would seem simple and clear enough to most folks. But the young people in the NBA cash very big checks. They are veal, fed on the milk of potential. It’s always about what they’re going to do down the road. That’s how they’re evaluated. That’s why it’s so easy for them to miss the point, to make huge assumptions that just aren’t true. And in the process, they let the opportunity of a lifetime slip away.
That’s already a bitter cud that Jackson and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal will have to taste every single day for the rest of their lives. Their silliness in 2004 (when they broke up a team that had won three titles) has cost the three of them dearly in terms of championships won.
They all acted like big brats and left huge winnings, the winnings of a competitive lifetime, on the table. They could have challenged Bill Russell and his Celtics. Instead, all they challenged was our patience. The three of them have been stalked by that truth since the day they parted in 2004 in a fury of bad adolescent gas.
So, it’s rapture time for Phil and his boys. It’s one of his many ways of saying it’s time to put aside childish things, time to focus furiously on the task at hand. There is no tomorrow.
Repeat that. There is no tomorrow.
If you think any other way, you’re just not a competitor. If you entertain any other thought, then the only rings you’re going to have are the smoke rings you’re blowing up each other’s asses.
The balance has shifted for the Los Angeles Lakers. In some ways, that shift has been subtle, and in other ways not so subtle.
Everything that seemed to go so well for them at the start of the season has turned brown and dull. Delight has devolved into question marks. Opportunity has become risk. The Lakers’ home game against the Boston Celtics Christmas day could be a measure of just how far that balance has tilted.
Veteran observers, such as West and Winter, are wondering if this shift doesn’t portend the beginning of the downside for Kobe Bryant’s career. If the Lakers aren’t careful with how they use Bryant, the normal aging process of an NBA superstar could be speeded up.
Lakers coach Phil Jackson was oh so aware of this situation as the season began. That’s why he announced that Bryant’s legendary heavy minutes (and thus his scoring burden) would be trimmed back.
It made sense. The process of hauling the Lakers around during their four-year rebuilding process has weighed heavily on the 30-year-old Bryant, who first came into the NBA at 17 fresh out of a Pennsylvania high school.
That rebuilding process culminated in the Lakers advancing to the league championship series last June, where they were first exposed, then smashed by the Celtics. Bryant’s grinding Lakers effort was followed by his prominent and taxing role in the U.S. Olympic victory in China.
As Bryant himself has often said, it’s not the age but the mileage that matters in a playing career. At age 30, his odometer shows a lot of wear and tear. And this season began with questions about Bryant’s legs.
The delight of November was that the Lakers showed a good starting lineup and a deep, energetic bench that allowed Jackson to keep Bryant on the bench for long stretches. He didn’t need to score with the reserves taking apart opponents.
How and why that bench play has declined will be the subject of debate for the rest of the season. This much is clear, however. Bryant’s teammates reached December and found themselves struggling with the mental part of the game.
“They’ve got a pretty good record,” Winter said. “But that could change quickly.”
Now they head into their Christmas day game with Boston, and the Lakers are facing the same ugly issues that stained them after the championship series last June. Are the supporting players mentally tough enough to compete for a championship?
Of late, those players have been revisited by the ghosts of Christmases past, the inconsistency and indecisive play that have eroded the coaches’ and fans’ – and most importantly Bryant’s – confidence in them.
Now, it seems, the team faces huge issues that could go far in determining how successful Bryant will be in the later stages of his career. Just as important, Bryant’s response to his struggling teammates could well shape his options as he plays into his 30s.
West, in particular, has expressed concern about the wear and tear on Bryant and the need for the team to be vigilant about leaning so heavily on him. West has observed that the time that Bryant gets on the bench each game to rejuvenate is critical at this stage of his career.
Unfortunately, the Lakers’ recent road trip would seem to indicate that issue is growing rather than receding. Bryant’s teammates have not played well of late. And the recent knee injury and impending surgery for backup point guard Jordan Farmar only serve to elevate the concern.
Tex Winter, the Lakers consultant and longtime Jackson aide, says it’s not an issue of effort.
“They are a group of guys who really give it their all,” Winter says of the roster.
However, it is a mental issue with the group, Winter said in an interview Monday.
“I think some of the players’ make-ups is that they’re not real confident in their abilities. And I think it does show through.”
Right now, Winter said, Bryant and Pau Gasol appear to be carrying the team.
“It gets to the point where Kobe feels like he has to take over. It gets pretty discouraging when your teammates don’t come through like we’d all want them to.”
When his teammates struggle and Bryant moves to shoulder more of the load, that only serves to send the team into its destructive spiral of the past.
“There’s no support then,” Winter says. “The other players just aren’t involved when he does that.”
In the past Jackson has employed psychologists to strengthen the competitive minds of his players. Winter, though, doesn’t see that as the answer this time around.
“They have to work it out on their own,” said the 86-year-old consultant. “As professionals they should have a strong enough competitive nature to do that.”
Forward Lamar Odom remains at the center of this revolving issue for the Lakers.
“He does a lot of things,” Winter said. “He’s a good floor player, but he’s just not very effective scoring the ball. He’s been very up and down and very erratic.”
After starting Odom for three years, the Lakers coaching staff decided to move him to a reserve spot to anchor the second unit this season. Winter said he and Jackson have discussed moving Odom back into the starting lineup.
That could mean using the versatile Odom at small forward, Winter said, noting that “Phil has been searching at that other forward spot.”
It could also mean moving Andrew Bynum to a reserve role.
“Bynum’s not playing nearly as well as he did early last year,” Winter said. “That’s to be expected. When you’ve been out a year with injury, it’s not easy to come back and have the kind of timing it takes to be successful.”
Expectations play a large role in the mentality of the issue. Bynum has signed a large contract extension. Both the young center himself and Lakers fans are eager to see him excel.
Bynum’s got a big future ahead of him, but it’s going to take time and patience, Winter said, adding that despite his struggles regaining his timing Bynum has shown he’s part of the “crux” of the team, with Bryant and Gasol.
The struggles can have a subtle impact on other confident players, such as forward Trevor Ariza.
“When you run into a little difficulty sometimes that confidence disappears,” Winter said.
Not surprisingly, the answer involves a familiar theme.
“A lot depends on Kobe, on whether he can keep the right attitude and play the right way,” Winter said. “If he becomes discouraged with his teammates as he has been at times and starts to take over all by himself, that wouldn’t be good. But that’s always the difficulty with a player of his abilities.”
It is perhaps where Bryant is most similar to Michael Jordan, Winter said, then added that it’s actually where he’s similar to other greats such as West and Oscar Robertson.
“That’s what separates those great players from all the rest,” Winter said. “They’ve got so much confidence, and they want to be the best and are willing to do whatever it takes to be the best. That’s why they are the best.”
Those players often feel that if they back down too much, if they let the dominance of their team slide, then they themselves cease to be great. Great players can lose status quickly if they don’t maintain that greatness edge, Winter said.
That mindset is what drives them to push themselves, and it’s what sets them apart, Winter said.
It’s often why fans and even coaches don’t understand truly great players.
“One thing about those rare players like Kobe and Michael and West and Oscar,” Winter said, “they want to be the best and they are never satisfied with anything less. That’s what makes them what they are. They’re all very complex.”
The combination of that drive and the circumstances threatens Bryant and the Lakers at this critical moment. Bryant’s competitive nature has always been the motor driving him.
Despite his concerns, Winter holds to optimism, mainly because Jackson remains in charge.
“Phil’s holds up really well,” Winter said. “He’s never too high and never too down. That’s a great characteristic as a coach.”
It’s a characteristic that has allowed Jackson to weather many a storm and find his way to success over the years.
If there’s an answer to be found, Jackson’s usually the one to find it, Winter said.
Tex Winter never pays much attention to what Shaquille O’Neal has to say. “He’s colorful, isn’t he?” the 86-year-old hoops guru says with a chuckle.
On the other hand, Winter watches very closely what Mr. O’Neal, the Phoenix Suns center, does on the floor.
It takes a lot to impress Winter, Phil Jackson’s longtime mentor and now a consultant to the Los Angeles Lakers. However, Winter admits to being impressed with what he’s seen of Shaq this year. “I think he’s in pretty good shape,” Winter said. “He’s a little thinner, a little better conditioned, a little more mobile, moving a little better than he has the last few seasons.”
Winter has viewed with curiosity the Suns’ acquisition last season of the behemoth O’Neal. At the time, Winter said it didn’t make clear sense, adding the big, lumbering fella to a team that was built to run. But having watched them adjust, Winter has come to believe that the Suns probably need to embrace O’Neal a little more than they have, to go ahead and find their new identity. In Shaq’s parlance, that would translate to “give me the ball and let the big dog eat.” “There’s a certain way you have to play with Shaq,” Winter observed. “Get him the ball on the low post, and go from there.”
A guardian of the game who never hesitates to criticize a superstar, Winter had his conflicts with O’Neal when the big guy was with the Lakers. Winter, though, conceded that “Shaq’s probably not getting it enough at this point.”
Of course, it probably would work better for the Lakers if the Suns remain conflicted and caught at crossed purposes. The competition in the Western Conference is already tough enough. O’Neal had recently implied that Jackson was somehow to blame for O’Neal’s feuding with Kobe Bryant.
Winter has long been on the record that Jackson, as Lakers coach, bent over backward to coddle O’Neal to the detriment of Bryant. As for O’Neal’s allegation that Jackson was behind the conflicts with Bryant, longtime Laker observers know that O’Neal had an aggressive agenda against Bryant months before Jackson or Winter came to the team in 1999.
Winter also paid little mind to the recent dust-up between the Lakers Trevor Ariza and teammate SashaVujacic. Ariza got upset with Vujacic for taking a badly missed three-pointer instead of moving the ball. The two had to be separated by teammates. Winter himself was never shy about making his opinions known. Lakers assistant Brian Shaw chuckles about Tex getting upset with him when he was a Lakers guard.
So it’s not surprising that Winter didn’t see anything too wrong with Ariza getting ticked off.
“I don’t blame him,” Winter said. “Good for him. I’ve always tried to let people know they’ve gotta play the game right. I don’t like people to discredit the game of basketball.”
Winter also noted that Jackson moved quickly to talk to Ariza about losing his temper. “Phil won’t let things hang,” Winter said. Of course, assistants sometimes had to step in back in the day when Winter, then Jackson’s assistant with the Chicago Bulls, would get upset with Luc Longley or some other transgressor.
Then again, there’s much about Ariza that brings the days of yore to mind for Winter. “Ariza’s got tremendous reach. He’s active,” Winter said. “When he’s playing defense he’s a little bit like (Scottie) Pippen with those long arms and the way he anticipates the passing lanes and gets his hands on the ball. “I’m not saying he’s another Pippen,” Winter added quickly but acknowledged that Jackson and his Lakers coaching staff have mentioned Ariza and Pippen in the same breath.
Longtime observers will recall that the great Pippen at 6-7 offered tremendous defensive versatility. He was able to sink into the lane to help defend the post, then showed the quickness to recover to the perimeter. “Ariza plays a little differently than Pippen on the help defense,” Winter said.
But the 6-8 fourth year forward reminds Winter of Pippen, Michael Jordan and Ron Harper, the Bulls triumvirate that ruled the league as stealers from 1996 to 1998. “Pippen and Jordan and Harper were good at laying back there and then jumping in and playing the passing lanes,” Winter said. “That’s why we (the Bulls) were a very good defensive club with those three guys. Ariza does that too. We need more like him.”
Winter was quick to add that this 2008-09 version of the Lakers is showing much defensive promise. Kobe Bryant has offered encouraging flashes of inspired defensive play. “Kobe will overplay and gamble a lot,” Winter said, acknowledging that such a ploy was also a Jordan trait. “But Kobe doesn’t lay back and come up with the basketball.”
It seems Winter is suggesting that Bryant add such a wrinkle to his portfolio, so keep a lookout for that at some point this season. “They’re working hard on defense,” Winter said of the Lakers. “They’re not the old Bulls. They’ll have their own character.”
The Lakers, of course, will have to improve dramatically as a defensive unit if they want to erase the memories of the hurting that the Boston Celtics put on them in the championship series in June. The pain of that loss seems to have added purpose to Jackson’s approach as well. “It’s motivated him to the point that he wants to get with it,” Winter said of the Lakers coach. “And he is getting with it. He’s controlling things a lot more than he did in the past.”
Then again, Jackson has more to control this time around. The Lakers are a very deep team. “He likes it,” Winter said of Jackson’s attitude toward the depth.
Asked if he thought this Los Angeles club has even more depth than the great Bulls teams that won six championships, the coach replied, “We had some pretty good subs in Chicago. But I don’t know if we had a team where the subs can play as many minutes as these Lakers guys can.”
Winter also is pleased that Bryant “has settled in to a team role” despite transgressions here or there that have left Jackson complaining a bit to reporters. “Kobe’s gotta hit shots,” Winter said. “He’s gotta take those outside shots. They’re important to the team. He cant’ go to the basket all the time.”
It’s a question of balance for Bryant, Winter said. The All-Star guard has to keep a steady mix between shooting and driving. That sounds simple, but it’s never easy to measure balance over the course of a game. “Kobe just can’t rely on one thing or the other too much,” Winter said. “Kobe wants to involve everybody else, and that’s good. But sometimes it’s maybe too much so. With players like Kobe and Jordan, it’s always a question of balance.”
Winter is preparing to rejoin the team in Los Angeles after taking a couple of weeks away to deal with the painful shingles that have bothered him for three years. Seemingly concerned about his mentor, Jackson suggested Winter contact his “holistic” doctor in New York who helped Jackson deal with hip pain. Winter has made the contact and is hoping for results.
Meanwhile, he’s eager to get back to the team to take his mind off the pain. Winter was also mindful of the passing this week of Pete Newell. Winter recalled that his Kansas State team went to Berkeley in December of 1958 and beat Newell’s Cal team that went on to win the NCAA championship that spring of 1959. Winter’s K State team spent part of that reason ranked number one in the country. But his club lost to Cincinnati and Oscar Robertson in the Midwest Regional Final, 85-75.
Newell’s club went on to beat Robertson and Cincy in the national semifinals before nipping West Virginia and Jerry West for the NCAA title. “Pete Newell was a great coach and especially a great teacher,” Winter said.
I wrote a Kobe Bryant/Michael Jordan feature for Lindy’s Pro Basketball 2008 Preview, the magazine that I have edited for the past 15 years. I sat down with Jordan for about 20 minutes over the offseason, which is the basis for the article, titled “In Michael’s Image.” I asked Jordan about Kobe Bryant and the loud criticism directed at the Lakers star for being a Jordan wanna be, an imitator.
Jordan and Bryant are close, which perhaps explains why Jordan said he doesn’t see what all the big fuss is about. After all, human behavior is mimetic. That’s what humans do. They copy and ape another.
Jordan acknowledged Bryant is the best of a generation of players who have tried to be like Mike.
“But how many people lighted the path for me?” Jordan asked. “That’s the evolution of basketball. There’s no way I could have played the way I played if I didn’t watch David Thompson and guys prior to me. There’s no way Kobe could have played the way he’s played without watching me play. So, you know, that’s the evolution of basketball. You cannot change that.”
Phil Jackson and Tex Winter, who coached Jordan in Chicago and Bryant in Los Angeles, have long marveled at the alpha male nature of both players. What critics perhaps still don’t yet grasp is that the issue involves personality types.
It’s impossible to copy a personality type. That’s a genetic trait. Copying Jordan’s physical abilities would be nearly impossible to do. Then, to duplicate his uber mind-set? Such a constitution is rare indeed.
“I tend to think how very much they’re alike,” Winter explained to me. “They both display tremendous reaction, quickness and jumping ability. Both have a good shooting touch. Some people say Kobe is a better shooter, but Michael really developed as a shooter as he went along. I don’t know if Kobe is a better shooter than Michael was at his best.”
Forget about jumping as high or shooting as well, who could work as hard as Jordan? Who’s willing to live a life of day-to-day, unbending grind? Who has the fierceness? The relentless desire that wears everyone else on the team out?
Jackson always pointed out that Jordan’s personality was great for winning games, but it tended to grind on the teammates around him.
Jordan sees these traits in Bryant and admits to being more than a casual observer. He’s fascinated by Bryant’s career, even able to relive some of his own experience by watching Kobe. After all, he too played for Jackson in Winter’s same triangle offense.
Perhaps nothing emphasizes the alpha male traits they share better than their similar reaction to injury.
Bryant, of course, was diagnosed with a torn ligament and an avulsion fracture last season. That means that the ligament pulled away from the digit and took a chunk of bone with it.
The injury isn’t so much continually painful as it is a source of numbness, unless someone strikes it during a game. Then it can become quite painful. It immediately raised questions about how the injury would affect Bryant’s shooting, a question that gets bandied about on the Internet.
Bryant could have had surgery during the season, but he wanted to keep playing.
He could have had it over the summer, but he wanted to play in the Olympics.
He could have it late in the offseason, but he has a serious agenda for the Lakers for 2009. That agenda doesn’t allow him to miss the early months of the season.
So he’s going to play on.
“I have always felt that I can still focus and play at a high level even through various injuries,” Bryant explained on his website. “That’s really just part of the game. When the doctors told me recovery from a procedure could be 12 weeks, I just decided now was not the time to have surgery. What it really came down to for me is that I just didn’t want to miss any time ‘punching the clock’ for the Lakers, given all we are trying to accomplish as a team this NBA season. I am just really excited and looking forward to being there with the guys when camp opens in a few weeks. That is a real bonding process and if I can avoid being on the sidelines for that, God willing, I will.”
Old-timers will recall that just three games into his second NBA season, Jordan suffered a broken navicular tarsal bone in his left foot, an injury that had altered or ended the careers of several NBA players. He missed the next 64 games, then insisted on coming back to play at the end of the season, even though doctors explained that he risked perhaps a 15 percent chance of ending his career.
Jordan didn’t care. He was determined to play.
“That’s the way Mike was,” Mark Pfeil, who was then the Bulls’ trainer, told me. “If he didn’t think something was gonna hurt him, he’d focus past it and play. Sprains, groin pulls, muscle spasms, flu, Michael’s first question always was, ‘Is it gonna hurt me to play?’ If I told him no, it was gone. He’d focus past it.”
“I didn’t want to watch my team go down the pits,” Jordan explained. “I thought I was healthy enough to contribute something.”
With Jordan back in the lineup, the Bulls went 6-7 over their last 13 games and despite a 30-52 finish somehow made the playoffs. In the first round of the playoffs, the Bulls encountered the Boston Celtics, who were on their way to their 16th world championship. Boston swept Chicago, but not before Jordan set the NBA abuzz with a 63-point performance in a double-overtime loss on in Boston Garden.
“That’s God disguised as Michael Jordan,” Larry Bird said afterward.
Critics want to make much of Bryant’s decision as some sort of PR move, or perhaps yet another attempt to mimic Jordan.
Actually, it’s pretty simple. Bryant and his Lakers got their butts kicked by Boston in the league championship series. Bryant and his team lost Game 4 after holding a huge lead.
Winter, a longtime Bryant mentor and observer, noted that he outcome was a huge setback for someone with the stated goal of becoming the game’s greatest player.
For Bryant, the agenda is to get into training camp with his team to get ready to compete in 2009. He wants to win, and he can’t do that sitting out in September, October and November. He’s got a young team that he needs to lead, to drive.
Kobe Bryant has done an amazing job behind the scenes reviving his sorely battered Los Angeles Lakers teammates to get them ready to compete for this year’s championship.
Tex Winter is back in Oregon now, after having spent weeks in Kansas following a late April stroke.
For Phil Jackson, endings have always been much more powerful than beginnings.
Tex Winter never pays much attention to what Shaquille O’Neal has to say. “He’s colorful, isn’t he?” the 86-year-old hoops guru says with a chuckle.