Gary Payton on not fitting in with Phil Jackson's triangle offense while with the Lakers

USA Today

20-04-2025

Gary Payton on not fitting in with Phil Jackson's triangle offense while with the Lakers
Gary Payton is a former member of the Los Angeles Lakers who has seemingly fallen through the cracks of the franchise's storied history. He was a Hall of Fame point guard who was a legitimate scoring threat and a masterful facilitator and floor general for many years. But he was mostly known for his withering defense, which led to him being nicknamed "The Glove."
He was mostly associated with the Seattle SuperSonics, the team he played for starting when he was a rookie during the 1990-91 season until he was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks midway through the 2002-03 season. During the summer of 2003, the nine-time All-Star and Hall of Fame power forward Karl Malone joined Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant on the Lakers, leading many fans to predict yet another NBA championship and possibly a 70-win campaign.
Instead, Murphy's Law reigned supreme during that 2003-04 season. The team was hit with a number of injuries, and it had to deal with Bryant's impending free agency and legal problems, among other things.
One of the other issues it dealt with was Payton not fitting into head coach Phil Jackson's triangle offense. He told Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson that it simply didn't work for him.
'It wasn't about me tripping and being incompetent at learning the offense,' Payton said. 'I didn't want to learn the [expletive] offense; I wanted to play the way I wanted to play.'
The triangle offense is a motion offense that minimizes the use of a traditional point guard who dictates the tempo and controls where the basketball goes during any given possession. Instead, it's an "equal opportunity offense" that is based on players running sequence after sequence in real time, based on how the defense reacts, and constantly moving the ball accordingly.
Payton, on the other hand, had a somewhat high usage rate and was very much the type of point guard who controlled things for his team. With career averages of 18.3 points and 7.4 assists a game before coming to L.A., he wasn't the type of prototypical point guard Jackson was used to having alongside Bryant or Michael Jordan.
'I came in used to having the ball in my hands,' Payton once said in a previous interview. 'All of a sudden I'm being told to go to the corner and wait? That's not how I play.'
In one season with the Lakers, his numbers dropped to 14.6 points and 5.5 assists per game. Despite their many problems, they managed to reach the NBA Finals, but their bid for their fourth championship in five years failed when they came apart at the seams and lost in five games to the Detroit Pistons. Payton only mustered a meager 4.2 points a game in that championship series.
He would get his ring two years later with O'Neal on the Miami Heat. But by that point in his career, he was merely a backup point guard and just another part of the machinery.