Tex Winter is an important part of Los Angeles Lakers history.
In sports, we sometimes see many assistant coaches who may not have had the best run when and if they were the actual head coach. Their greatest work came not as the head coach but perhaps as an assistant.
They work closely with many great players and are proponents of many different aspects of the field in which they work in. A rare breed of cerebral innovators who make a huge impact, not only on various players, or systems but on sports overall.
Tex Winter was one of those people, and for those of you whom do not know, he was a staple in professional basketball and a genius.
Winter was once the head coach of the Houston Rockets where he compiled an underachieving record of 51-78 in just two seasons. Before that, he had enjoyed a lengthy and successful career as a college basketball coach.
He had a very good run at Kansas State University where he compiled a record of 261-118, and had gone to the Final Four two times. After that, Tex Winter would coach Washington, Northwestern, and Long Beach State.
His greatest achievements came not as a head coach but from being an assistant coach for the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, where he was part of nine championship teams as well as being a huge proponent of the now-famous triangle offense. It was from head coach Sam Barry, who coached Winter as a player at the University of Southern California that he learned the triangle.
The triangle offense would define the Los Angeles Lakers.
Tex Winter would go on to be an assistant coach for Phil Jackson with the Los Angeles Lakers and the Chicago Bulls during their glory years. It was he who helped implement the offense and teach it to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Winter worked with both players and helped them develop their games within the offense.
He was a very smart and intellectual person who had a knowledge of the game and knew how to plug players in and get the most of them within it. Winter reminds me of the great Bill Walsh and the famous west coast offense in football. Walsh, who spent time with the Oakland Raiders and the Cincinnati Bengals before going on to the glory years with the San Francisco 49ers, helped to develop this system.
People such as Tex Winter and Bill Walsh are a special group of minds that come along once and a while and bring with them this wonderful knowledge that they had been part of in their pasts and help others to learn and adapt to it.
So many times, we do not give the proper respect to people such as Tex. They are like the mad scientist who spends their time in the laboratory, concocting different experiments. Many look at them and wonder if they are quite mad but you know what they always say.
Sometimes, where this is madness there is also genius. That’s what Tex Winter was as well as his system. It was genius and it will always be remembered and respected.