One former Los Angeles Lakers champion is thinking outside the bun as the team continues to struggle.
The Lakers dropped yet another game on Friday night, losing at home to the Memphis Grizzlies 127-113. They are now 17-19 on the season and 3-10 ever since winning the NBA’s In-Season Tournament (with six of those ten losses coming by double digits).
Retired ex-Lakers forward Lamar Odom responded to the team’s struggles with an odd suggestion to his X page over the weekend.
“There is only 1 way to fix the Lakers,” he wrote. “RUN THE TRIANGLE!!!!”
There is only 1 way to fix the Lakers… RUN THE TRIANGLE!!!! https://t.co/C169qUDtPR
— LAMAR ODOM (@LamarOdom) January 6, 2024
The triangle offense was popularized by Phil Jackson with the Chicago Bulls and the Lakers in the 1990s and 2000s (with Jackson’s assistant coach Tex Winter serving as the mastermind behind the system). Jackson won 11 total championships with the famed equal-opportunity halfcourt offense, including with Odom as a key cog on the 2009 and 2010 Lakers.
That said, the game is no longer played from the inside out like it used to be, and the post-up as a central facilitator of offensive actions is all but obsolete now (devaluing one key aspect of the triangle). More recent attempts by NBA teams to implement the triangle offense have flopped quite badly, especially since the system takes a very long time to master. The triangle would almost certainly not work with a player like LeBron James either since it would largely take out his ability to hunt mismatches and get downhill, instead turning him into more of a one-touch passer and a midrange jump shooter.
NBA teams do still occasionally run triangle-influenced actions with star players who have the appropriate skillsets. But James is not one of those players, and the Lakers’ issues may have more to do with their rotations than with the offensive system currently in place.
