Former NBA player and coach Phil Jackson told Bleacher Report he is not a fan of the “hero ball” style of basketball, popular with many of the league’s leading scorers.
Jackson — who won two NBA titles as a player with the Knicks and 11 more coaching the Bulls and Lakers — stated that while some teams still emphasize a strategy “that involves all five players and emphasizes ball and player movement,” it’s a shame that the faces of the NBA, specifically self-proclaimed “Best Player in the World” LeBron James, don’t play the game the proper way. (VIDEO: Guess Who LeBron James thinks Is The Best Player In The World)
What Jackson did talk about at length was his belief in “a structure” or “a format” that involves all five players and emphasizes ball and player movement, whether it’s the triangle or another system. He cited the Spurs and Warriors and Hawks as teams that exemplified the ideal.
He disdains much of what he sees: an endless series of pick-and-roll plays, one setting up the next, until someone gets a layup or a three-pointer.
“The game actually has some beauty to it, and we’ve kind of taken some of that out of it to make it individualized,” Jackson said. “It’s a lot of who we are as a country, individualized stuff.”
Indeed, Jackson seems much less concerned with validating the triangle than with the state of the game itself.
“When I watch some of these playoff games, and I look at what’s being run out there, as what people call an offense, it’s really quite remarkable to see how far our game has fallen from a team game,” Jackson said. “Four guys stand around watching one guy dribble a basketball.”
The lack of structure extends even to the basic tenets of the game, Jackson said.
“I watch LeBron James, for example,” he said. “He might [travel] every other time he catches the basketball if he’s off the ball. He catches the ball, moves both his feet. You see it happen all the time. There’s no structure, there’s no discipline, there’s no ‘How do we play this game’ type of attitude. And it goes all the way through the game. To the point where now guys don’t screen—they push guys off with their hands.”
He concluded: “It struck me: How can we get so far away from the real truth of what we’re trying to do? And if you give people structure, just like a jazz musician—he’s gotta learn melody, and he’s gotta learn the basic parts of music—and then he can learn how to improvise. And that’s basically what team play is all about.”
[h/t: Yahoo, Bleacher Report]