I think the triangle experiment is doomed to fail but this is bullshit.
Guys, Phil Jackson might be kind of dumb.
Well, that's a lede.
but that bit about the game moving in "mysterious" ways is exactly the kind of philosopher-as-basketball-coach bullshit that makes Jackson ill-suited to construct a modern NBA roster.
The bit about mysterious ways is the only chunk of that block quote that isn't an actual direct quote from Phil, which to me suggests that Phil said something else that the author chose to sum up as "the game, stylistically, evolves in mysterious ways."
Leave aside the fact that Jackson's successful triangle teams always featured at least one all-time superstar in his prime (and usually two). Leave aside the fact that he seems to fundamentally misunderstand how a screen-and-roll offense works—if he really believes that Klay Thompson isn't "participating" in the offense while he waits for the kick-out pass in the corner, or that the best versions of those offenses don't rely on an enormous amount of synchronized off-the-ball motion,
Klay standing in the corner (the Deadpan writer's own choice of example) is not off-the-ball motion.
Lots of modern offenses DO have lots of standing around watching a ball-handler and a big working in tandem to create a favorable one-on-one opportunity or open shot. They need to be predictable so they can receive passes and so they don't accidentally send their defender in the path of the going to work, etc.
Dismissing the success of the triangle or putting an asterisk on it because Phil succeeded with all-time talent is fair. If you want to play that card, though, you can't then turn around and start talking about the BEST VERSIONS of modern offenses, which can be dismissed in the same way (We're not talking about the Warriors' schematic brilliance if Stephen Curry isn't there). Talk about a team with mid-level talent like, say, the Jazz.
This is damning. This is an admission that Jackson isn't so much trying to build a good team as he is trying to validate a set of dusty philosophies in the modern era
Wow he wants to install a system and have it stick so that his coach can keep it going even without Phil looking over his shoulder. What a piece of shit.
"He nonetheless expressed no misgivings — "not one moment"— over trading Chandler, whose defensive presence would have helped this season but who, in Jackson's view, did not have the matching skills to play in the triangle going forward."
But here's Phil Jackson admitting that he dealt away his team's only good defensive player not because he thought Chandler was bad or on the verge of breaking down, but because he didn't fit into an arbitrary system—a system that was itself designed, supposedly, to best allow a roster's most talented players to maneuver.
Or, if you're an adult who isn't on the spectrum, it's just obvious bullshit hemming and hawing around the fact that Tyson Chandler was not happy in New York and was gonna get the fuck outta town when he hit free agency anyway and the handful of wins he might've added over the course of one season would only serve to weaken the Knicks' most important building block: their 2015 first round pick.