Basketball: NBA great inspires local coaches

By PETER JESSUP

With the benefit of tutelage from American master coach Tax Winter behind them, national league coaches go into the penultimate round rejuvenated for games crucial to playoff places.

Only Waikato are guaranteed a finals spot, at home, this month.

Nelson will make or break against Auckland at Unitec tonight and across the bridge against hapless North Harbour tomorrow.

Wellington are likely to make the playoffs, but face two hard away games against Hawkes Bay and Auckland.

Auckland have to win tonight away to Wellington, then Palmerston North, to finish their season.

They are without forward Daryl Cartwright, who has a broken wrist, for the Nelson game and the rest of their season.

A clinic by Winter at Youthtown on Wednesday night for coaches was a tonic for Auckland and Tall Black coach Tab Baldwin as the domestic season builds to its climax and the international season approaches.

Winter, a 55-year coach, assistant to Phil Jackson as the Chicago Bulls won six NBA titles and lately the LA Lakers two, had put meat on the bones of what Baldwin knew about the visitor's famed triangle offence.

Winter had showed how various adjustments could be made, the options that could be followed and opportunities exploited as teams worked to defend against the triangle, Baldwin said. He has followed the Winter scheme, but this season been without the block that Auckland's championships were based on, Pero Cameron.

Winter admitted that his game plan relied on a star, if not two, and in that he had been lucky with Michael Jordan at the Bulls then Shaquille O'Neal at the Lakers.

"You don't get to be champions without great players and I was very fortunate," he said. "At the Bulls there was Jordan assisted by [Scottie] Pippen.

"At the Lakers there are two great players in Shaquille and Kobe [Bryant]. But it requires the rest of the 12 to do their job. It's not that they have to play second fiddle - they have to play their role," Winter said.

The Bulls had more trouble convincing Jordan he had to pass to others than they did convincing others to play for Jordan, Winter said.

"It's a team game - you can't win it on your own, you won't win a championship if you don't have a team."

His principles are:

1. Penetration - play the court baseline to baseline.

2. Maintain a 5m-6m distance between players.

3. Maintain good defence balance, and good position to take rebounds.

4. On attack, deliver the ball to the first man who is open and create operating room for the attack by the approach.

Winter had been Jackson's boss at the Bulls and was about to retire when Jackson was promoted to head coach.

"I was fortunate he embraced my philosophy," Winter said.

But now the pair were feeling less as though they needed each other, and family and other commitments appealed as he approached 80.