Another day, another person taking a shot at LeBron James. This time it comes courtesy of New York Knicks president and all-around basketball coaching icon, Phil Jackson.
Many within the NBA continually blast LeBron James for his infamous ‘crab dribble’ and suggest he’s traveling when he does so. That includes Phil Jackson who appeared rather salty when talking about the Cleveland Cavaliers star recently.
“I watch LeBron James, for example,” he said. “He might [travel] every other time he catches the basketball if he’s off the ball. He catches the ball, moves both his feet. You see it happen all the time. There’s no structure, there’s no discipline, there’s no ‘How do we play this game’ type of attitude. And it goes all the way through the game. To the point where now guys don’t screen—they push guys off with their hands.”
He concluded: “It struck me: How can we get so far away from the real truth of what we’re trying to do? And if you give people structure, just like a jazz musician—he’s gotta learn melody, and he’s gotta learn the basic parts of music—and then he can learn how to improvise. And that’s basically what team play is all about.”
The agitation in Jackson’s voice is evident.
“The game actually has some beauty to it, and we’ve kind of taken some of that out of it to make it individualized,” Jackson said. “It’s a lot of who we are as a country, individualized stuff.”
Indeed, Jackson seems much less concerned with validating the triangle than with the state of the game itself.
“When I watch some of these playoff games, and I look at what’s being run out there, as what people call an offense, it’s really quite remarkable to see how far our game has fallen from a team game,” Jackson said. “Four guys stand around watching one guy dribble a basketball.”
Well, we all know Carmelo Anthony has never traveled before, right?
Seriously though, while I understand Phil Jackson’s point on a basic level, calling out LeBron James probably isn’t the way he needed to go. But Phil Jackson is a world-class instigator and everything he does has a purpose, so….
