AEnigma wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:But in the end, I'm still a believer that there was something distinct to Jordan's focus over the course of particular seasons to push his team to the brink. I also believe that part of what allowed him to do this was a bullying-form of leadership that we know including him throwing unprovoked punches to teammates, and yeah, there's a part of me that would like to normalize for this positive/negative in some way...but if we're just talking about the success of a season, Jordan to me still seems like the king though I think that the way he drove his teams probably did reduce their shelf life.
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If you asked me to name one team in NBA history as "Most ready for battle", I'd have to go with those Bulls coming with such an unusual level of intensity given their stature.
I am curious why this would be attributed primarily to Jordan rather than primarily to Phil “11 rings” Jackson. If we want to discount 2008-10 on the basis that Kobe was fully emulating Jordan by that point, we can do so. But that leaves 2000-02, where Kobe was certainly not much of a leader yet, and while I do not place much stock in the value of leading through bullying that we saw with Jordan and to an extent Kobe, Shaq was happy to settle for outright bullying.
Accordingly, in a locker-room built around a hard-working but hostile isolationist (in multiple ways) and a talented but lazy clown with an anal fixation that manifested through fecal harassment, the obvious leader in
that dynastic locker-room is and has always been Phil Jackson. Factor in that the Bulls became a serious contender only when Jackson took over, and that the Bulls stayed a quasi-contender when Jordan left — someone needs credit for that magical “extra-motivation” that seems to have escaped so many other teams in similar circumstances — and the sole through-line across twenty years of near-Russell success becomes the Zen Master. And of course that is also reflected in every effort I have seen, shaky though they may be, to quantify “Coaching impact”, e.g. through coach rapm and the like.
Oh so, speaking as a born & raised Angeleno Laker fan who was following locally all through the time in question, I would not characterize any of those Laker teams as having uncanny focus/drive/resilience. They had maddening issues which I would place primarily on Shaq while he was there, but it continued to be a character flaw of the team even afterward.
Now, getting into Shaq & Kobe in detail is something we could do, but they are more indirectly related to Jordan than Jackson is.
I would say that there was a resilience to the Jackson Bulls that there wasn't on the Jackson Lakers, and further, that Jackson Bull resilience was STILL there in '93-94 without Jordan. The continued resilience of the Pippen-Grant Bulls sans Jordan is something that can be used against Jordan, but the more fundamental thing to me is to try to identify the why and how.
I would say that the key to the team faith in Jackson's philosophies was Jordan deciding to be all-in on them. When he did that, the other players became more effective and more confident in their triangle-shaped roles, which led to becoming champions. At that point, the whole roster was bought in on Jackson's approach, and it was a point of pride for them to prove they could still be very good after Jordan.
While we might expect that Jackson's comparable chip success in LA must mean he achieved a similar level of buy-in from his Laker players, but again from my experience they never did - they achieved the mammoth success they did (5 chips, 7 finals) despite this.
Now, there are levels to buy in, and zero buy-in means the coach gets fired, so I'm not saying Jackson got zero buy-in in LA. The reality is that he got more buy-in than any Laker coach since Riley, but it was a struggle. By his 2nd year in LA, the Shaq-Kobe feud would already be the stuff of legends, and when that feud led to permanent schism, Jackson retired and wrote a book with absolutely scathing criticism of Kobe who had been actively pushing against Jackson's triangle philosophy.
So then, while we should whenever appropriate talk about the lovely redemption of that professional relationship with the Phil-Kobe-Pau years, just from a proof perspective, I think it's clear that culturally, the Phil-Shaq-Kobe Lakers lacked the same type of alignment the Phil-Mike-Scottie Bulls were known for. (Note: Scottie would chafe in his non-Batman role beginning before Jordan's return putting a dent in that alignment, and I would say demonstrate just how critical Jordan's obsessive drive was to Bulls getting back and better than ever.)
But then, I'm not looking to just say "Phil just had so much talent between Shaq & Kobe, they couldn't lose." The great miracle of '99-00 for the Lakers wasn't because of massive offensive improvement (as it was in Chicago), but massive defensive improvement, that had everything to do with getting Shaq to have peak (for him) commitment to getting in shape and taking defense seriously. Basically, I would say Jackson had an impact here that came from being a "championship coach" getting through in that teachable moment to a mega talent who had previously not responded to a coach like that since he was a kid.
We then note that by the 2nd year, that pixie dust wore off and the Lakers once again stopped being a contender-level team...until the playoffs when they turned it on and reached the absolute pinnacle of play for the era. This "flip the switch" defense worked when it worked, and then of course eventually, caused an electrical fire that burned the whole house down.
I want to also single out Jackson's success identifying, and riding, extremely effective non-volume scoring role players all through his coaching career in both cities. I think this was critical to why his teams had such consistent success beyond what other talented star-cores have been able to do (Jackson has the only 3 3-peats of the post-Russell era and an additional back-to-back).
I've pointed out the lineage of read & react NBL/NBA champions in the past, but to do it briefly here again:
The Rochester Royals of the '40s & '50s, adopting the style of play of their star Bob Davies, played fast and specifically passed fast and moved constantly in the half court, and chipped in '46 & '51. One player on that team was Red Holzman. (Another player on that team was American football GOAT candidate Otto Graham, which I'd be happy for us to talk about, but is way, way tangent to the point at hand.)
Holzman would go on to coach the New York Knicks in the '60s & '70s, choosing a read & react style like he played in in Rochester, they chipped in '70 & '73. One player on that team was Phil Jackson.
Jackson (obviously) would go on to coach the Chicago Bulls & Los Angeles Lakers beginning at the tail of the '80s and ending at the head of the '10s, he would famously adopt Tex Winter's Triangle offense...which is a react & react style like he played in in New York, and they chip 11 times beginning in '91 and ending in '10. One player on that team was Steve Kerr.
Kerr would go on to coach the Golden State Warriors from the '10s to present, choosing a react & react style like he played in in Chicago, and they would chip 4 times beginning in '15 and ending in '22. One player on that team was <TBD>.
Anyway, what I'm looking to point out is that these types of read & react schemes, require the role players to be actively thinkers out there. They work best when the superstars are doing the same to be clear, but I would say that what Jackson demonstrated was an ability to "ready the troops" for when the star talent was ready for the spotlight.
The requirement for the role players to be active thinkers, I would suggest, is the actual barrier that has flung back read & react style player autonomy from taking over the league a long time ago. Basically, when you try this with guys who lack the right levels of - I'll call it - awareness, it goes really, really badly, and so you have to be able to identify and prioritize the guys who can do it (that is, can be taught to do it proficiently by you and your staff) and move on from guys who can't.
Of course I don't mean to suggest that Jackson only chose the tippy top BBIQ guys for his non-scorers, so much as a level of collective decision making on the floor was something he saw as necessary. Players with limitations in decision making, the team gave less decision making too, and if it could work out, it worked out (thinking of guys like Bynum & Artest here).
But I'm really talking around the never-all-stars here like:
Paxson
Harper
Kukoc
Kerr
Horry
Fox
Fisher
Walton
Odom
(and Ariza too, I suppose, though part of me feels like putting him next to Artest thematically)
Folks might object to putting them all together - some are more impressive than others certainly - but I think it's important not to just look at these guys as "lucky to be there". With every single one of them, these are guys who really worked for Phil, and worked better (or at least took some kind of successful leap) with Phil than the coaches they were working with before even if it came with a major downgrade in primacy.
I think we should really celebrate these guys, and what they collectively represent, as a big deal for Phil when we consider specifically how he got the Lakers over the hump. While the Shaq-Kobe 3-peat was at the time disparaged as 2 talents with an unremarkable supporting cast, I would say that they actually had quite effective supporting casts, particularly when they gave up on their 3rd star experiment (Glen Rice).
Then of course, for the Kobe-Gasol era, what we get is a team known specifically for its length advantage (Gasol/Odom/Bynum), along with one wing-sized pitbull (Ariza/Artest), and the same old backcourt of Kobe & Fisher, and it works remarkably well. Obviously you might say it worked 2-chips-well, but specifically I want to point out the harmonization of play that happened during the '07-08 season, and while the big transaction (Kwame out, Gasol in) was obviously HUGE from a talent upgrade, more subtly, Odom started getting into a groove as a lesser primacy guy where his impact started spiking well beyond all-star levels...as a 6th man?
I think there's a special place for a tortured soul like Odom. He was seen as an extreme basketball talent, and through his early career with the Lakers, he was continually seen - reasonably so - as a guy who'd never really figured out how to put it all together despite being given every opportunity. He was supposed to be Kobe's co-star, and he just couldn't be that.
Then, it all comes together, and he plays in this beautiful way that effectively gives the Kobe-Gasol Lakers a Big 3 at times, and then the bottom falls out. They get swept in 2011, Odom gets traded, and his mental health - always precarious - tilts, and he's never the same again.
I'd give significant credit to Jackson, Kobe & Gasol for allowing Odom to morph into what he became. He couldn't be the rock the franchise used to build the core, but once that Jackson-Kobe-Gasol core got there, he was just the guy to shore up the gaps.
Okay wow, I'm going to stop myself here. I rambled a lot there so feel free to just respond to what's relevant.
I'm not sure I agree with your take on Jordan's passing at all, falcolombardi. I'm actually a bit surprised by it. I was watching some of the 91 playoffs recently (a lot of the games are available on YouTube), and I was pretty consistently impressed with Jordan's passing.