Among American basketball fans, the offensive scheme known as the
Triangle has become a bit of a joke lately. Writers have referred to it
as “outdated” and “obtuse.” In January, Mike D’Antoni, the Houston
Rockets coach, who is regarded as an offensive virtuoso, told reporters,
“If the Triangle hit me upside the head, I wouldn’t know what it was.” A
month later, the former N.B.A. M.V.P. Derrick Rose denounced it as “just
random.” The final punch line, perhaps, was delivered in late June, when
Phil Jackson, the Triangle’s most prominent practitioner, agreed to step down as the president of basketball operations of the New York Knicks.
Jackson won eleven titles as a coach, employing the Triangle offense
first with the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan; and later with the
Los Angeles Lakers, and their dominant duo of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe
Bryant. After three abysmal seasons with Jackson, the Knicks plan to
abandon the system, leaving it without an advocate in the N.B.A.

But eighty-five hundred miles away from Madison Square Garden, in the
Philippine Basketball Association, the Triangle remains a winning
formula. “I love the free-flowing nature of it, yet the disciplined
play,” Tim Cone, the head coach of the P.B.A.’s Barangay Ginebra San
Miguel, told me recently. Cone has used the offense to win nineteen
championships—making him, by far, the most successful coach in the
league’s history. The P.B.A. season functions more like pro golf or
tennis than the N.B.A. Each year includes three “conferences,” or major
tournaments, so teams can win three championships per season. Sweeping
the conferences is considered a grand slam, which Cone’s teams have
accomplished twice, in 1996 and 2014.

The basic setup for the Triangle involves putting a big man in the post,
a forward on the wing, and a guard in the corner. But after that,
execution is quite difficult: the long list of reads and riffs that
follow is complicated. Players must practice them extensively and
become fluent with each other’s preferences. This partly explains why
teams have stayed away from it—it’s a risky and time-consuming
experiment. Players grow up learning other, more popular schemes, such as
the motion offense and the pick-and-roll. In the Philippines, despite
Cone’s success, no other teams have adopted it.

There’s a common perception that the Triangle only succeeded in the
N.B.A. because the greatest players in the world were running it. Cone
has coached a few M.V.P.s over the years, but he’s never had a
transcendent talent like Michael Jordan. P.B.A. rules only allow teams
to sign one non-Filipino player, called an “import,” who can’t exceed a
certain height—between six feet five inches and six feet ten inches,
depending on the conference. Imports, often fringe N.B.A. players
journeying abroad, have been known to dominate the international scene,
but they also jump between countries and contracts frequently, making it
difficult to pick up the nuances of complicated offensive schemes.

Basketball has a long, complicated history in the Philippines. American
teachers introduced the country to the sport in 1898, following the
Spanish-American War, well before other nations learned how to dribble.
While the rest of the world was preoccupied with soccer and baseball,
the Philippines obsessed over hoops. When basketball became an Olympic
sport, in 1936, the national team contended for a medal. The P.B.A. was
established in 1975, and ranks as the oldest professional-basketball
league after the N.B.A. In his book “Pacific Rims,” from 2010, the writer Rafe
Bartholomew describes the P.B.A. as “a miniature N.B.A.” But, as Jackson
was collecting his last championship rings with the Lakers, American
basketball was taking a turn. N.B.A. teams began emphasizing the
three-pointer and abandoning their commitment to post play. As a result,
the Triangle’s appeal faded in the States.

Cone was born in the United States, went to high school in Manila, then got his
college degree from George Washington University. He began coaching in
the P.B.A. in 1989, for the Alaska Air Force. (The team had no
connection with the U.S. military; it was owned by a Philippine company
called the Alaska Milk Corporation.) During his first year, he found
himself casting about for the right offensive strategy. One day, he
caught a Chicago Bulls game on a pirated U.S. military TV station.
Jordan was on the court and Jackson was on the sidelines.“When I watched
the Bulls play, it was like a light bulb going off in my head,” Cone
explained in an e-mail. “It seemed to me that while other teams were
playing, the Bulls were dancing.”

Cone didn’t master the geometry of the Triangle right away. “I started
videotaping the games on an old Betamax and then proceeded to break the
games down. I diagrammed the whole offense and after about six months,
introduced it to the team,” he said. “One thing I learned early in my
career—don’t teach what you don't know. In our first year, as I
continued to try to teach it, we had our worst record in our
organization's history, and I was nearly fired.” In the second year,
however, when Cone “really committed to it,” the team had its best year
ever.

The history of the Triangle can be traced back to the nineteen-forties,
when Sam Barry, then the head coach of the University of Southern
California, invented the “Triple-Post Offense.” Tex Winter, one of
Barry’s former players, adapted Barry’s system as a coach at Kansas
State, leading that team to a pair of Final Fours, in 1958 and 1964.
Winter brought it to the N.B.A. in 1971, when he became the head coach
of the Houston Rockets. In the eighties, Winter started working with
Phil Jackson, eventually serving as an assistant coach on nine of
Jackson’s championship teams (he was a consultant for the final two).

Cone now considers himself one of the last remaining disciples of
Winter’s wisdom—his Twitter bio declares “Tex Winter protege. True
Triangle guy.” The two met, in the summer of 2000, when Winter was in
town for a few basketball clinics. “From that point on, he became my
mentor until he suffered his stroke,” in 2009, Cone said. According to
Bartholomew, Winter later tried to recruit Cone for a job as an
assistant coach for the Lakers’ summer league, but Cone turned down the
offer due to a scheduling conflict with the P.B.A. season. This spring,
before Jackson’s exit, a few reporters tossed out Cone’s name as a potential Knicks hire, arguing that his wizardry with
the Triangle could help N.B.A. players master the system. “Have to
admit, that would be fun,” Cone said. “But I love the P.B.A. There’s
nothing quite like it.”

Now, with Jackson gone, it’s unlikely that Cone will sit on an N.B.A.
sideline any time soon. And Cone told me that even he had lately
“ventured out” from the pure Triangle and incorporated some
pick-and-rolls. “It kills me to say this—because I love and respect Tex
so much—but the Triangle, as Tex strictly envisioned it in terms of
routes and patterns, has seen its last days in the N.B.A.,” he said.
Still, he added, “the philosophies and the read-and-react principles
that were so integral to the Triangle and Tex Winter will be in every
offense. Basketball moves on, it moves forward and doesn't look back. As
it should be.”