The Key to an NBA Title? You're Missing the Point

There's a tag usually given to teams that have great guards and forwards but lack an adequate center. They're called "donut teams" because, like their deep-fried namesake, they're empty in the middle.

But what do we call those teams that possess legitimate big men but lack a premier point guard?

Phil Jackson has a name for them. He calls them champions.

Take a look at some of the point guards that Jackson has won his nine championships with—B.J. Armstrong, John Paxson, Steve Kerr, Ron Harper, Randy Brown, Derek Fisher, and Tyronn Lue.

Not exactly Magic, Oscar, Tiny, Clyde, Zeke, and Cooz.

If Jackson passes Red Auerbach in June for the most NBA titles won by a head coach he'll do so with Fisher and Shannon Brown running the point.

While some have questioned whether the duo is good enough to win a championship with, recent history has taught us that the point guard isn't as vital to a team's drive for a title as it once was.

There's no denying that so much of Jackson's success is due in large part to having coached four of the best players to ever play the game. But each of his titles has come with contributions from role players at crucial points in the biggest games—and more often than not it was one of his unheralded point guards who was responsible.

Even more impressive than the underwhelming list of names with which Jackson has won championships with is the list of point guards that Jackson's teams have beaten en route to his nine titles—Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, Gary Payton, John Stockton, Kevin Johnson, Mark Jackson, and Jason Kidd—arguably five of the seven greatest point guards of all-time as well as seven of the top-15.

For the most part, Jackson has shied away from traditional drive-and-kick point guards and relied on tandems made up of savvy veterans who take care of the ball, play defense, and can knock down an open jump shot.

These tandems are usually comprised of one smaller guard like Armstrong, Kerr, Paxson, Lue, and Fisher and a bigger guard like Harper, Pippen, Brown, Trevor Ariza, and Brian Shaw—shooting guards and small forwards who can bring the ball up the court, initiate the offense, keep up with quicker guards and create headaches for their opponents with their size and length.

With Fisher and Brown this season's Lakers team is no different. 

While the Lakers struggled at times this season containing the quicker guards like Deron Williams, Chris Paul, Steve Nash, Rajon Rondo, Parker, and Billups they still managed to post a 13-4 record in the games they played against them.

Fisher has undeniably lost a step but can still take a charge or knock down a pull-up jumper when his team needs it most. He was struggling from the field heading into the playoffs but seems to have shaken off the rust in making 44 percent of his field goal attempts in the first four games against Utah.

Brown, the third-year guard from Michigan State, was initially thought to be a throw-in when the Lakers acquired him along with Adam Morrison in a February trade with the Charlotte Bobcats.

But during the last week of the regular season the 6-4, 205 lb. Brown supplanted Jordan Farmar as the team's number two point guard.

The move was initially seen by the public as a ploy by Jackson to light a fire under Farmar but Brown has seized the opportunity and turned Farmar into an afterthought.

Through the first four games of the Lakers' first-round series with Utah, Brown has made six out of seven three-point attempts and has averaged 8.5 points per game—more than double his career average.

The Myth of the Dominant Point Guard

The 1990-91 Chicago Bulls were the first team since the 1977-78 Washington Bullets to win a championship without a top-tier point guard.

Every team to win a title between 1979 and 1990 had either Dennis Johnson, Magic Johnson, Tiny Archibald, Maurice Cheeks, or Isiah Thomas manning the point—one great point guard, three Hall of Famers, and another who should be in the Hall of Fame.

But that's a tad bit misleading.

Each of those teams also had either Jack Sikma, James Worthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Robert Parish, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Bob McAdoo, Moses Malone, Julius Erving, Joe Dumars or Bill Laimbeer as well.

Of the 18 teams to win NBA championships since 1991 all but the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons had at least one current or future Hall of Famer in their starting lineup and not one of them is a point guard.

You could even go so far as to say that Tony Parker is the only starting point guard to win a title in the past 19 seasons who even has a shot at enshrinement in Springfield.

Gary Payton is headed to Springfield but he was a back-up to Jason Williams when the Heat won the title back in 2006.

Rajon Rondo is only in his third season so he's still a few years away from even having his name mentioned in the same sentence with those three words.

J-Will, Kenny Smith, Ron Harper, Derek Fisher and Avery Johnson aren't getting into the Hall of Fame without paid admission and Chauncey Billups will probably be penalized by the selection committee for taking five seasons to realize his potential.

Something has happened over the last 19 years to debunk the myth that a team needs an All-Star caliber point guard to win an NBA title and much of that is due to how the game changes in the postseason.

Most teams in the NBA run some variation of either a Flex Offense which relies on cutting (Utah Jazz), a high post offense like the the Triangle which depends on running the offense through the low post with a companion two-man game on the weak side (Los Angeles Lakers), or the Princeton Offense which relies on back-door cuts and defensive mismatches (Houston Rockets and Boston Celtics).

In the playoffs the game tends to slow down and teams are much more reliant upon half-court offenses to score. Coaches are more dependent on calling timeouts and drawing up plays—especially at the end of each quarter.

For the most part, shooting percentages in the playoffs tend to go up because teams take better shots. It's usually the centers and power forwards who find themselves in position to take those higher percentage shots.

The Triangle Offense doesn't require a prototypical point guard since it relies on spacing and getting everyone involved rather than depending on one player to handle the bulk of the distribution.

Because of that it's no wonder that Jackson's teams never seem to have a point guard in the top-10 in the league in assists but yet they always seem to have a shooting guard and a center in the top-5 in assists for his position.

It's as if Jackson's philosophy is that he'd prefer to have three of his players in the league's top-25 in assists than have just his point guard in the top-10.

And who are we to argue with him? He's got nine titles.