Triangle Shapes Up Well

The triangle offense, or the “overload,” as the current coaching staff prefers to call it, is back in the Laker playbook, marking a successful, if not unexpected, season debut Friday.

The Lakers ran the scheme that Tex Winter originally built, in the place that Shaquille O’Neal claimed to have built, only this time it was Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom combining for 47 points and 14 assists in a bounce-back game that was important enough for Coach Rudy Tomjanovich to label beforehand a “playoff” game.

The results are what they are: The triangle wasn’t the foundation for every offensive set in the Lakers’ 111-104 victory over the Houston Rockets, but with it in the armory, the Lakers won for the first time this season when allowing an opponent 100 or more points, erasing a curious 0-12 streak in such situations.

The Lakers and the triangle have reunited. Or, as one Laker said while exiting the locker room that night, “It’s a beautiful thing, ain’t it?”

It started when Bryant went to Tomjanovich before Thursday’s practice and asked whether there was a way to deal with the defenses that had ensnared them.

“Teams have been sitting back and sagging on us,” Bryant said.

Bryant and Tomjanovich have chalk-talked often since Tomjanovich was hired in July, and this was no different.

“I asked him about the Princeton offense, and he said, ‘How about one better -- the triangle?’ ” Bryant said. “He said he liked it because he ran something similar to it as a player.”

Tomjanovich was coached by Winter for two seasons with the Houston Rockets in the 1970s.

Bryant often said the triangle was boring but acknowledged that it won championships. He responded to questions about it after Friday’s game with a touch of excitement, calling its possibilities boundless because there were more “fluid” athletes now on the Lakers.

“It wasn’t bad for our first game,” Bryant said. “It paid off with just one day of practice. Now defenses can’t sag. We’re moving the ball. Guys are cutting. Lamar and I are in the ‘pinch’ posts.”

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The Lakers, Rockets and five others are within four games of each other in the joust for the final three playoff spots in the Western Conference. It’s only January, but Tomjanovich was prompted to mention it before Friday’s game: “I called it a playoff game in shoot-around,” he said after the Lakers’ win.

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Bryant (27 points) and the Rockets’ Tracy McGrady (26 points) and Bob Sura (20 points) donated $1,000 for each point they scored Friday, a combined total of $73,000 earmarked for a UNICEF South Asia tsunami relief fund.

“I tried not to think about it,” McGrady said. “But at times, whenever I made a shot, it was like, there’s $2,000 for them, there’s $3,000.”

The Lakers matched Bryant’s $27,000 donation.