The Triangle Offense is a system used in basketball since the 1940’s. American college coach Sam Barry is credited with it’s creation and it has been refined since by Tex Winter, another U.S. college coach who went on to become an assistant to legendary NBA head coach Phil Jackson.

The Triangle is most famous for all the championship success it brought to Phil Jackson’s NBA teams, first with the Chicago Bulls winning six titles in the 90’s and then with the Los Angeles Lakers tallying up five titles in the 2000’s.

I believe that success speaks for itself and I’m not here to add to the discussion on that. Despite this proven success the Triangle philosophy has not been copied successfully at the the elite NBA level.

This blogsite is something of a homage to the Triangle, as well the coaches who taught it and the players who entertained us with it over the years. I have made a series of animations to illustrate what the Triangle is and explain some of the basics of how this system works.

As a both a player of basketball and a die hard fan, when I first started getting interested in the Triangle I was really disappointed how little clear information there is out there about how the system actually works. In large part this is because the offense itself isn’t mainstream in Pro basketball.

It represents somewhat of a counter-culture, by rejecting a lot of basic notions people have about basketball, for example the point guard being the ‘quarterback’ of the team. It’s because of this that the Triangle is harder to teach, but also more fun to play and great to watch.

The big knock on the Triangle is that it’s hard for coaches to teach and hard for players to execute. This is true if both the players and the coach are locked in to the idea that only the point guard makes decisions, only the star player shoots etc.  Once these preconceptions are blown away , the Triangle can be as simple or complex as you like. It is made effective or ineffective by how versatile your players are and how willing they are to work as a team.

So this is my take on the Triangle. I hope the animations help clearly illustrate the Triangle format and clearly explain some of the basics of how this system works. I’ll be making regular posts with more detail about the system and some of the scoring options I’ve learned based on my own study of the Lakers and Bulls in action doing their thing.

Be sure to check back from time to time, as I update and refine my postings regularly the more I learn and observe about the offense. Tex Winter wrote an entire book explaining and detailing his system. I’m not going to dare to even pretend I can explain it as fully as he. These animations are intended to be very simple and easy to follow, covering only the basic elements of the Triangle and is aimed at people who play or coach basketball to compete for fun, not for mega-buck contracts.

Once players understand the Triangle system, they can use as much imagination and creativity as they have to combine options and interchange positions within the format. Maybe a mathematician would take a stab at figuring how many possible variations there are for five players to arrange themselves in and out of a triangle. I’m guessing a lot…

Rather than try and create some A to Z catalogue of the Triangle Offense I made this blogsite because I believe if you break down the Triangle Offense into its very base concepts, you could start introducing it piecemeal at youth levels of basketball. If you teach and practice the necessary skills to produce versatile players, as players mature they can be empowered to use their own basketball creativity to explore the full range of the most successful systems in basketball history.

Hope you enjoy,

The Awl Sports Blogger

2010 L.A Lakers – Example of the Triangle Offense