Phil Jackson is about to win his tenth NBA title, probably tonight or Tuesday.  It can be debated whether Phil is the greatest coach of all-time, but there’s no doubt that he’s done what he needed to get the Bulls and the Lakers to the top of the mountain.

As usual, back to Robert Greene and The 33 Strategies of War, which I learn something new from everytime I pick it up. Kind of like watching Zen Master Coach, and how he applies some of these strategies to his coaching.

Declare War On Your Enemies:  In most sports, this usually refers to the other opponents, but in basketball, the war is from within. Phil knew the biggest enemies to the Lakers’s progress would be their mindset, roughed up after getting wiped out in last year’s Finals. Were they tough enough? Could they handle the spotlight? Could they fight the concept they were soft?

Phil Jackson is pushing Pau Gasol. Has been pushing him. Since the beginning of training camp. Since the last seconds ticked off the clock in the Lakers’ ugly loss to Boston in Game 6 of the Finals last June.

“He’s yelled at Pau more this season than at anyone I can remember in a long time,” Lakers assistant coach Kurt Rambis says. “He’s been working him, needling him, constantly challenging him to be better than he was then, to be a tougher rebounder, a tougher defender.”

Playing with greater resolve — absorbing blows more carelessly and lowering a shoulder more forcefully — isn’t a switch you throw, it’s an attitude you arrive at, a process you survive.

 Many of us remember the famous anecdote from the 1991 NBA Finals, when Jordan was looking for his shot in traffic instead of passing out to the open John Paxson, and in a timeout Phil asked MJ who was open. After asking him several times, Michael finally said, “Pax.” Phil replied, “Then get him the fucking ball.” From that point on in Game 5, MJ drew the double team, found Paxson, who nailed five jumpers in the final four minutes to give the Bulls their first title. Jackson picks his spots, finds the weak points in his team’s psyche (Michael’s and Kobe’s willingness to take over the game, Shaq’s passive-aggressive behavior, Scottie’s whining, Gasol’s lack of toughness), and challenge it when the team needs it. In terms of managing the emotions of his stars, no one has done it better as a coach than Phil. 

Do Not Fight the Last Battle: Many coaches are stuck in the same path, using the same strategies or same sets that they’ve used for their entire life (Jerry Sloan with pick and roll, Rick Adelman with hands-off hoops, George Karl with god knows what). Ultimately doing the same thing over and over leads to predictabilities that can be exploited. 

Phil doesn’t coach that way. For the most part he works above the set offenses and defenses, letting the players find their own way on the court–not exactly hands off, but to make them fight their way through tough stretches, to work together for the benefit of the team.

Hit Them Where It Hurts: When he needed to, Early in the 1991 NBA Finals, down 1-0, Phil Jackson targeted Magic Johnson.

Phil Jackson had a sense that his team had played beneath its level, that it had struggled with first-game jitters; he was confident that there were some defensive adjustments he could make tha twould impede the Lakers’ flow on fofense. He was not that unhappy…In Game Two, an early second foul on Jordan psuhed Jackson’s hand. He woudl have Pippen guard Magic on defense, something he had pondered doing early on. It was a marvelous move: Pippen was nearly as tall as Johnson but much quicker at this stage of their careers, and Johnson was unaccustomed to that combination. Pippen’s defense of Johnson seemed to throw the Lakers offense out of sync [and they would go on to lose the next four games].

~David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps

Notice how Phil has done something similar with Dwight Howard, crowding the lane with Pau Gasol playing much better defense than a year before, Bynum doing alright, and Odom coming over with great activity. Howard in this series has been fairly ineffective in the offensive end, and the Lakers have taken advantage of this. When he can, Phil finds the center of gravity of his opponent and makes sure he can’t get his production in easily. 

Avoid Groupthink: Phil spoke about his philosophy as a coachwhen comparing the way he treated his players compared to Riley’s.

Jackson was asked how his coaching style differs from that of Riley. “Pat is a person who works hard and uses his work ethic for great productivity,” Jackson said. “It’s a great form of discipline. But my feeling is that it’s restrictive. I encourage freedom. What I believe in is harnessing a certain amount of discipline so that the players can have freedom within parameters.”

Indeed, Riley’s authoritarian ways got him pushed out of LA and New York, as his controlling ways were too much for his players to handle. Jackson has almost never had that problem with his players, letting his players feel their way out and guiding them through rough spots.  His method of coaching relies on that sort of operational calculus where everyone flows and figures out how to work the offense that makes it maximally effective.

Segment Your Forces: See how some of Phil’s players talk about his operating practices, about how his eccentric style inspires his team to play better than they are.

Thus, he controls the dynamic: While people may think that this is Jackson ceding control of the game to the players, it actually increases his power as a coach; instead of the regimental hierarchy that exists between player and coach, Jackson harnesses this power to his advantage, builds trust between him and his players, and in turn there is not much tension when they play on the court.

Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, the two most talented players Jackson has ever coached, were either begrudging or disinterested in the way Jackson coached the team, believing they could win. By the end of MJ’s career and approaching the end of Kobe’s, neither couldn’t imagine playing for anyone else, Jordan saying outright that he wouldn’t play for anyone else. If that isn’t controlling the dynamic as a basketball coach, what is?

Take the Line of Least Expectation. There is certainly nothing conventional about the triangle offense, a read and react system that requires players to adapt to the situation on the court. Bill Simmons made a great point in this New Yorker article abut how Jackson’s lineup defies convention.

Also, L.A. runs the triangle and doesn’t need a conventional point guard; you need interchangeable swingmen, one rebounder, passing big men, and one scorer who can create his own shot when things break down. Phil Jackson has a chance to win his tenth title—tenth!—without ever having an All-Star point guard on any of those teams. That’s amazing.

Indeed, basketball is supposed to be won with a great point guard running the team. Phil Jackson has won nine rings with John Paxson, BJ Armstrong, Ron Harper, Steve Kerr, Brian Shaw and Derek Fisher running point. Each has had their moments though, but it certainly has broken the belief that without a dominant one-guard your team was going nowhere (indeed, the Lakers have beaten three teams with more talented point guards in these playoffs).

Manuever Them Into Weakness: Again, the trangle offense is the closest thing to manuever warfare in basketball. It forces players to read and react based on how the defense is positioning to take care of them. Take a look at this breakdown of how the triangle is run.

Lose Battles But Win the War: The LA Lakers have been in strange situations this season. They lost the race for the best team and thus lost home court advantage throughout the playoffs to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Turned out it didn’t matter (and if the regular season meetings meant anything, Cleveland was not on the same level as the Lakers this season).

They played games up and down late into the regular season and deep into the playoffs. The media questioned whether Phil was losing his grip on the team. But Jackson seemed to be the only one to realize the NBA Playoffs weren’t single-elimination.

They lost two games to the Rockets without Yao Ming…everyone in LA panicked at the thought of Game 7. Except for Phil.

 

“No, I’m not worried,” Jackson says. “There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s just a game, and we’re just going to go out and play, and it’s our home court, and it’s what we’ve played for.”

At first blush, he’s brushing it off, maybe protesting too much, maybe not respecting the Rockets enough.

But that one isn’t for the room, and it isn’t even for the fans losing their religion on talk radio and local message boards. It’s for the players down the hall, sweating out their disappointment and putting on their anxiety. It’s for Gasol, itching to prove he can improve on last season’s finish. It’s for Lamar Odom, needing to dig deep to overcome a lower back injury. It’s for Bryant, maybe squeezing the egg so tightly he’s in danger of crushing it.

That one is a critique of the idea of worry itself. That one says, Worry is not the disposition that will get us through this. Confidence is what’s needed. Faith in the system and the personnel and the preparation is what is required.

 

Derek Fisher looked done in the Houston series and everyone was wondering; now he’s established in Finals lore.

Phil trusts his guys, and the trust filters down to his players, to Kobe finding Fisher for the spot up game-winning 3.

Give Your Rivals Enough Rope to Hang Themselves: George Karl, Jerry Sloan, Rick Adelman, Mike Dunleavy. These coaches have been to the NBA Finals, dueled with Jackson numerous times to the Playoffs, and lost every single time. You know the analogy where when some guys are playing checkers the winner was always playing chess? Same concept here.

Stan Van Gundy has felt the bite here too.

Game 4 showed the contrast between the philosophies of Phil Jackson and Steve Van Gundy. Fisher had been struggling for the past 2 months. For the game he was 0 -5 from 3, yet Phil Jackson understands that the true essence of a man is the most important of all. Trust in Fisher’s character allows Jackson to let go the fear and give Fisher the chance to succeed. On the other hand, SVG’s actions are driven by fear. Why did Nelson play the last 18 minutes instead of Alston? “Well he wasn’t really hurting us out there”. He wasn’t helping you win either. The fear that Alston might fail to deliver dictated SVG’s tactics and in the end had Nelson and all of his 5?10? height closing out on Fisher.

Why didn’t they foul right away? The fear that the Magic players would choke the free throws dictated tactics. They should have fouled right away and SVG should have trusted their abilities to make foul shots. But SVG didn’t. Phil Jackson is open to the potential of success but not afraid of failure, and therefore allows his players to just play. SVG is consumed by fear, infuses doubt in his players, and it cost him the game.

 

Transformed the War Into A Crusade: It was no secret that the Chicago Bulls players disliked Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause, the owner and GM for the Bulls at the time of the championship years, and Phil Jackson used that as a unifying force on several occasions, especially for underpaid players like Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant:

The alienation of team from management was not without its potential upside for Jackson, a man both supple and subtle. Eventually, he was able to use the very isolation of the players from the front office–the belief on the part of many of the players that the front office was essentially hostile to their goals and did not want the team to win a sixth championship–as a unifying force.

He would use similar such psychological ploys with the Lakers in 2000 (which created a focused Shaq that we haven’t seen before or since) and this season, when media people doubted that they could win the title because they didn’t have the drive or focus to complete the journey.

Know How To End Things:  Phil could have ended his career with that messy three-way divorce with Kobe & Shaq in 2004. But it would’ve left been the wrong way to finish things, would’ve tarnished his legacy that he had lost his powers to motivate his players. 

It’s possible that during his final years with Shaq’s Lakers, Phil might have veered off course; he was unable to rein in Shaq or Kobe, and it inevitably became the undoing of that Lakers squad, who bickered and fell apart as a squad at the very end. 

So he came back a year later, and slowly but surely guided Bryant from offensive wunderkind to all-around team player (certainly not the greatest team player ever, but just enough to involve everyone in a title run). Phil talks about the process of becoming successful in a book he wrote about the infamous 2004 season, The Last Season. 

“Tex [Winter], who is definitely no Buddhist, has a saying that I’ve grown to love: ‘You are only a success at the moment that you do a successful act.’ You can’t be a success the next moment because you have already moved onto something else, even if it’s accepting an award for the successful moment that just passed. That is why I’ve always told my players the glorification comes from the journey, not the outcome.”

Being able to get through to Bryant, a player who has struggled to accept coaching or help, to build that trust that hadn’t always been there before, might be Phil’s crowning achievement, and that’s saying a lot.

Indeed, by putting the emphasis on the big picture rather than the small, by focusing on the present rather than the past and the future, Phil Jackson has coached some of the best to the pantheon of greatness.

(Image by thefinaltruth)

For those not familiar with the story, Xenophon was a Greek philosopher/adventurer back in those ancient times. He accompanied Greek mercenaries under Cyrus into the heart of the Persian empire to march on Babylon to overthrow Cyrus’s brother, the Persian king Ataxerxes. The attack failed, Cyrus was killed, and the Greek commander was ambushed and beheaded by Persian soldiers on the trek back to Greek territory. As the Greek soldiers began to fall into despair, Xenophon began to cast himself into the spotlight.

“That night Xenophon, who had stayed mostly on the sidelines during the expedition, had ad ream: a lightning bolt from Zeus set fire to his father’s house. He woke up in a sweat. It suddenly struck him: death was staring the Greeks in the face, yet they lay around moaning, despairing, arguing. The problem was in their heads. Fightin for money rather than for a purpose or a cause, unable to distinguish between friend and foe, they had gotten lost. The barriers between them ”

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

Eventually Xenophon would help inspire the Greeks to forget about these internal battles and turn their fight outward onto the Persians. He told them to focus on one goal: Getting home to Greece. Inspired by this call to arms, the Greeks managed to elude the Persian army and get back to Greece in reduced, but still healthy numbers.

Now, what does that have to do with the Big Cactus? Let’s take a little look at his personal taste in movies:

“Remember, Shaq’s favorite movie is “The Warriors,” the ’70’s classic where the top gang leader in New York City (Cyrus) holds a gang summit and tries to organize the first-ever gang revolution. As Cyrus points out, the total number of gang members doubles the number of police officers in the city, which logically means that they can overpower them and take over everything. Apparently, he didn’t know about the National Guard, the FBI, the Army and the Marines. Anyway, Cyrus gets assassinated at the gang summit — one of the most devastating screen deaths ever, right up there with Sonny Corleone and Hooch — and everyone incorrectly blames the Warriors, an unassuming gang from Coney Island.”

Sound familiar? The Warriors is actually based off of Xenophon’s Anabasis. The struggle, the despair, the leader stepping up (Swan taking the place of Xenophon).

What is striking is that despite this being Shaq’s favorite movie, he doesn’t seem to have learned the deeper meaning behind the message of the film. If he did, he might very well be most dominant center ever. Simmons wrote a fascinating paragraph about Shaq’s reaction in the 2006 NBA Finals, that even with Shaq playing the Robin role he still couldn’t cede the spotlight. The victory had to be about him, in some form or the other.

Shaq has struggled with internal drama his entire career, to the detriment of his team and perhaps his legacy. That he could never show up and lead his team to big victories (and it’s still debatable whether he’s ever shown up). That the NBA had to change the rules so teams could defend him. That he never put in the work to make his damned free throws.  That everyone was out to get him. That his coaches were never good enough or masters of panic. That his teammates didn’t get him the ball enough. That his centers That his sidekicks (Penny, Kobe, Wade) were selfish and immature.  

Perhaps there’s some truth to that. Shaq is candid like that. But what does it tell us about Shaq that he says such things? Is he just trying to make excuses for his narcissism and self-indulgence?  He could’ve had at least seven to eight dominant seasons rather than three (imagine that 2000 season replicated six to seven times over), like Bill Russell and Kareem, and left the game as undoubtedly one of the greatest to ever play the game. Right now he’s sitting somewhere in the top 20, with two of his sidekicks (Kobe and Wade) on their way to surpassing him.

Shaq could’ve overcome all of this if he had the foresight of Xenophon or the will of Swan. Instead of being ruthless and destroying his opponents on the court after winning his first title, he retreated and did just enough to squeak his way to titles. If he had battled his inner insecurities and turned the inner drama into an external battle he waged to get to the top. 

But he could never truly crush his insecurities. His career won’t be a disappointment, but it’ll be diminished from what it could’ve been. Shaq can say he’s the greatest center ever all he wants. We all know the truth. He didn’t do quite enough to get out of Persia.

• Faye Dunaway was HOT when she was young. Now I know what they mean by damsels in distress. Her Texas twang was charmin.
• Warren Beatty hasn’t changed much in 40 years, has he? He looks and talks exactly the same.
• Gene Hackman playing third fiddle is the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen, and he isn’t even that good.
• The banjo theme was pretty kicking.
• What’s frustrating is how cookie-cutter the storyline is. The acting is very good (although Lord knows why the woman who plays Hackman’s wife won an Oscar for the banshee wails that came out of her mouth), the cinematography is good,  but we only scratch the surface of the escapes of Bonnie and Clyde. They did much bigger things than were used in the movie, but Beatty and the producers appeared more interested in the mythos of the gang and developing that the most.
  I dunno. I guess I wanted the movie to be an hour longer. They glossed over a lot, but I guess it wouldn’t be such a pop culture hit if it was three hours long. It’d probably be a better film.
• More Faye Dunaway. My goodness.
  
• Buy on Amazon

One thing that Razib points out is the fundamental difference between gender and genre. Males enjoy plot-driven stories, escapist fiction. We don’t want to focus on characters and their development, we want storyline and plot. Get to the point, get to the next point, etc. Women enjoy more of the character development stuff, the writing prose, etc. etc.

So I was wondering–is our interest in certain books wired into our own primitive desires? Do we like certain books because they fire up a part of our own evolutionary structure?

Think about it. Men enjoy plot-based books, with an aura of mystery but also of adventure and exploration. Books have the power to take us away. It takes us away from the burden of work and responsibility, provides us refuge from the toil we endure. We have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families, and while the gender gap has made dramatic shifts in the past 200 years, our brains don’t evolve nearly as fast.

Just like the supposed theory that our bodies have supposedly not caught up to agricultural products toxifying our body, our brains have not yet fully caught up to the idea that women can now bear equal responsibility, so it takes our own growth and development in life to adjust to this. Because of the growing amount of entertainment options in the Internet age and the relegation of books to a niche activity among the XYs, many of us never do.

Women, on the other hand, have traditionally been groomed to find mates. Unlike male, whose work, intelligence, wealth, and physical stature defined him, a female was traditionally defined by the strength of her partner. So it became important for her to find that character, and that required deep examination of human psychology to attract suitable mates. So isn’t it natural that females would enjoy books that involved deep character study and soothing words of comfort and seduction?

(Another possibility is that if females were not happy with the mates they got, they could dream up their ideal Cassanova to escape the doom and gloom of their situation. Hence the continuing popularity of harlequin novels for women in completely unsatisfying marriages.)

I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, but the last work of fiction I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it touched me so profoundly because of how mystical and otherworldly it was. I felt like I was being transferred away from this world and into a dream. It was…liberating. I certainly felt like I was in another world, and didn’t have to worry about the one I was in now.

Sound familiar?

There’s my crock theory. Someone please tear it apart.

Not that the iPod is a bad thing. It’s a great study tool, it’s a great mobile music kit, it’s great for workouts, it’s great for alone time, it’s great for college rave parties, or whatever general students enjoy. Pick your spots and it has its uses.

But more and more often…I see more and more people tuning out the world and tuning into their Top 50 mixes. And I wonder why people automatically place those earphones in the moment they walk outside. Is it a way to escape from saying “Hi” to a stranger? Or avoid meeting the greetings of that girl or boy who attracts you across the street? Or just avoiding the relaxing randomness of life and keeping things safe, simple, and boring?

This is what worries me. That a generation with so much promise and hope is going to tune out the world’s problems and focus solely on their own.

Why do people use their iPods so much?