Former NBA head coach Byron Scott isn’t the biggest fan of the kind of offenses that teams run in the NBA today. Scott implemented the Princeton offense during his coaching career, and he stated on Byron Scott’s Fast Break podcast that it and the triangle offense won’t work in today’s NBA because the players aren’t smart enough.
“When you’re running the triangle or you’re running what we call the Princeton offense back in the day, if you got players who have a high basketball IQ, like you said, you ain’t got to call s***,” Scott said. “‘Cause the defense dictates what you going to run.
“And so if you got players who are smart, they figure that s*** out in a heartbeat,” Scott said. “And again, like you said, if you’re going to pressure us, we would just go farther back out. Now we going to open up the court that much more. So now you got set up to back door cuts and everything else.
“So it made it so much more difficult for teams to guard you because, like you said, you can call one action,” Scott continued. “We would, like you said, we would say same side. Okay. So you take away that pass to the corner. We just swing it back up top. We got a two-man game over here with a double pin down on the weak side.
“And it’s reads is all it is it’s reads,” Scott added. “And I think one of the reasons they say it won’t work today, players aren’t smart enough.”
Both the Princeton and the triangle offense are read-and-react offenses and are born out of principles like offensive spacing and floor balance. You don’t run exact sets, but instead react to what the defense is throwing at you. If a team has smart players, they can run those offenses very well.
Former NBA head coach Phil Jackson implemented the triangle offense during his time with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. Jackson had Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen with him on the Bulls, and they’d three-peat twice in the 1990s, from 1991 to 1993 and 1996 to 1998.
Jackson then went to the Lakers in 1999 and three-peated again, this time with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant from 2000 to 2002. He would also win back-to-back titles with Bryant in 2009 and 2010.
Jackson’s 11 championships are the most for any coach in NBA history, but his and the triangle offense’s detractors believe all that success was down to the star power. Former NBA head coach and player Brian Shaw was the guest on this episode of the podcast and dismissed that notion.
“They say that well, you need two great players like Shaq and Kobe, or like Scottie and Michael,” Shaw said. “But when Michael retired, the Bulls still won 55 games that next year, running a triangle without having two stars.”
Jordan had retired for the first time in 1993, and the Bulls still went 55-27 in 1993-94 without him. They lost in the Eastern Conference Semifinals that year, but could well have won the series if not for a phantom foul call. That Bulls team might have gone all the way without Jordan, and that speaks to the effectiveness of that offense.
As for Scott’s Princeton offense, it helped the New Jersey Nets get to the NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003. They lost on both occasions, but standing in their way were two dynastic teams in the Lakers and the Tim Duncan-led San Antonio Spurs. It was a very effective system, and while it’s not implemented today, we do see some concepts of it being used.
That might not satisfy Scott, though. Along with the offenses, another issue that he has with today’s NBA is analytics. It’s safe to say he wouldn’t be all too keen on coaching again in the league.
