Lakernoise

We owe so much to that daggone Tex Winter.

Take, for example, the use of the word “facilitator.”

In Winter’s complex triangle offense, you have to have someone who sort of pilots the machine, who gets the group into the offense, makes the key passes, helps the group through its reads and changes.

Someone who sets things up.

That’s the “facilitator.”

I first heard Winter use the word in explaining Scottie Pippen’s role with the Chicago Bulls back in the 1990s. Pippen had become the facilitator for that team. He played forward, but he ran their offense like a point guard.

Winter’s triangle offense was based on six principles of team play until Winter started working with Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 1980s. Then Winter added principle no. 7, which basically says that sometimes there are players with such overwhelming offensive talent that you have to have a rule that allows him to override all the other rules.

That was Jordan. Principle no. 7.

As a young player developing in the NBA and in Winter’s offense, Kobe Bryant became a child of those two fathers—Pippen, the facilitator, and Jordan, No. 7, what I’ll call The Weapon.

Bryant has regularly flirted with facilitation during certain moments in his Lakers career, but it has been a process. Obviously his facilitation role developed gingerly during his days with Shaquille O’Neal in the post.

Bryant has long hungered to be The Weapon, of course. But it says much about his skill level and his mind that Bryant can be whatever he wants to be at any given moment.

He’s been called a ball hog by a lot of people over the years. Winter would get frustrated with him, but he never looked at Bryant in those terms. Having worked so closely with Jordan, Winter had gained an understanding of supremely talented players.

Like Jordan before him, Bryant could be overwhelmed by his own competitive nature, by his drive, by his “urges” to dominate.

Winter understood those. He could become frustrated by them. But he understood them.

Winter always considered the tension between No. 7 and the rest of the team to be that key area that made the triangle so special. After all, supremely talented players could often take off and leave the team behind at another level.

Also an extremely keen mind, Jordan himself understood this principle and the tension between the team and No. 7. He was often quoted as saying, “The triangle gave me a way to relate to my teammates.”

When he became an assistant to coach Phil Jackson with the Lakers, Winter’s offense offered the same tension—the same ultimate liberation—for Bryant as well.

We’re witnessing this long journey come to fruition during the Lakers’ current first-round series with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Faced with a young, athletic team, able to get out in transition and run the Lakers out of the building on a given night, Phil Jackson has asked Bryant to become more of a facilitator in this fascinating first-round battle.

That request that Bryant do more by doing less seemed a miserable failure in Game 4 as the Thunder whipped the Lakers and evened the series at two games apiece.

Many observers figured that Game 4, where Bryant took just 10 shots and scored 12 points, was evidence of some highly questionable snit by Bryant who was again trying to prove a point to his coach and the team, that he needed to be No. 7, not the facilitator.

There were predictions that Bryant would revert to being No. 7 and throw down a huge offensive performance in Game 5. Instead, Bryant again played as a facilitator, allowing the Lakers to work the advantage of their superior frontcourt. For Game 5, Bryant took just nine shots, and the Lakers won in a blow-out.

Faced with carrying less of a burden on the offensive end, Bryant was freed up to make his superstar contribution on the defensive end, just as it had in the 2008 Olympics when he used energy and athleticism to set the tone for Team USA’s run to the gold. His play also reminded me of the tremendous tenacity that Pippen could bring on the defensive end.

Bryant also brought to mind his own play in the Lakers’ run to the 2001 NBA title, when he was young and struggling to find an identity between the two roles.

A long-time mentor and assistant to Jackson, Winter continues to deal with the effects of a debilitating stroke he suffered last April. But the 88-year-old had to be delighted with what he saw last night.

Once again, Winter was turned down for election to the Basketball Hall of Fame this spring. But Winter’s touch is all over the game, all over Bryant’s game.

When Bryant was a teen-ager, frustrated in the Lakers’ offense under coach Del Harris, he told me one day after practice that he’d always dreamed he would play for Tex Winter, who was then an assistant coach with the Bulls.

I told Bryant I would get Winter to phone him to talk basketball. It was a highly unusual move, for the assistant coach of one team to phone a frustrated and lonely young player on another.

As I watched Bryant play last night, I thought of that phone call, and how Winter’s assuring voice was a light in the darkness for Bryant, how Winter became Bryant’s mentor over the ensuing years, how he helped Bryant learn to deal with his own immense talent.

I could only think of how proud Winter would be of Bryant’s performance as a facilitator in a key moment for his team, how Bryant’s play summed up his greatness, a talent that all the fans and observers can catch thrilling glimpses of, but a talent we can never understand.

That, too, is part of Winter’s greatness, and part of Phil Jackson’s as well. Both coaches gained the genius to understand such rare talent. They know how to coax and cajole and encourage Bryant between those two roles, No. 7 and the facilitator.

Everyone knows Bryant has been a superb No. 7 over the years. But he’s one hell of a facilitator when the situation demands it.

It leaves me with full confidence that Bryant will accomplish another giant feat one of these days. By the tremendous force of his great nature, Kobe Bryant will put Tex Winter in the Hall of Fame.

Tex, you can rest easy on that one. Kobe wants you there and he will not be denied. In a big way, he’s making that statement with his play. He always has.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.