Tex Winter was a highly successful head basketball coach in college, but he was mostly an assistant coach in the pros. To casual fans at N.B.A. games, he was simply the guy with the wavy white hair sitting on the bench in the shadow of one of pro basketball’s most renowned head coaches.
But all the while, Winter was refining his legacy — the triangle offense, a scheme emphasizing ball movement and teamwork that he taught to Phil Jackson as his mentor and assistant coach on nine N.B.A. championship teams with the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers.
“I wasn’t a very good coach and didn’t have a lot of knowledge, and he had a lot of knowledge,” Jackson once said in reflecting on Winter’s advice during Jackson’s early years with the Bulls. “He’s like the mind of the basketball gods.”
Winter died Wednesday in Manhattan, Kan., where he lived. He was 96 and had been largely incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in April 2009. Kansas State University, where he was head coach for 15 seasons in the 1950s and ’60s, announced the death.
Winter, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, spent 60 years in the sport. He played for Southern California as a senior, coached five college teams and had a stint as head coach of the Houston Rockets before reaching the pinnacle of his career, when his offensive blueprints helped propel Jackson’s Bulls to six N.B.A. titles in the 1990s and his Lakers to three consecutive championships, from 2000 to 2002.
Jackson won another two championships coaching the Lakers after Winter was no longer his assistant. But Jackson, a former Knicks forward, had three dismal seasons as their president, while continuing to champion the triangle, before departing in June 2017.
Those Bulls teams were led by Michael Jordan, supported by Scottie Pippen, and the Lakers teams featured Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. All four would have dominated in any scheme, but Winter took some of the burden off them by insisting that all their teammates become involved in the offense.
Winter’s system involved three players — the center down low, another player in a corner and a third one at the top of the 3-point line — forming a triangle on one side of the court with the two remaining players on the opposite side. The players were all spaced 15 to 20 feet apart, preventing defenders from double-teaming the likes of Jordan and Bryant. The scheme called for constant player movement and sharp passing, allowing someone, most often the star scorer, to take advantage of a befuddled defense to get off the best possible shot. It involved numerous options, with new triangles constantly forming.
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