I have been running triangle on my Grand Valley State team in Phelen for 2 seasons, and I haven't been paying much attention to that and have been playing it like a motion, that's a mistake I now realize and I was wondering if someone could help me with distribution and such.

It's very far away from the motion in terms of what it needs.

The motion is the offense that allows you the most to spread the load and have a balanced scoring attack and score decently with low lp/per with great bh/pas. It requires the most passing and probably 2nd most bh behind FB. With high passing players with those good/great offensive ratings can be great weapons. Elite offensive players are slightly underused and maybe shoot a bit worse than other offenses but it is possible(my D3 teams rely on high passing and 1-2 heavy players carrying the load)

The triangle is the super star offense that requires 1-3 guys to take on heavy roles and lead the team, it' the hardest to score with just ath/spd/bh/pas. It's also the best LP offensive set imo as well

If you cannot consistently recruit good scorers such as for guards 60 ath 80 spd 90 per 60 bh and big men like 60 ath 20 spd 90 lp then I highly recommend moving away from it as you will just be hurting yourself. I think having the occasional elite scorer in the motion/flex/fb is better than occasionally having a strong scorer in the triangle, as without an elite scorer the triangle is the weakest whereas without an elite scorer you can still run efficient other offenses.

Onlyis, don't you think the triangle should have three powerful scorers on the floor at all times? My thinking is that you need three threats and combination of LP and PER to keep the defense honest. By three powerful scorers I mean a guard and a big man like you described, along with a third player who is a legitimate dual threat like a SF with at least 50-60 is ath/speed/LP/Per/BH. I have tried different things with the triangle and it seemed to work better when I kept the distro to my best three scorers.

So what would distribution look like

Posted by deroches on 4/10/2016 11:32:00 PM (view original):
Onlyis, don't you think the triangle should have three powerful scorers on the floor at all times? My thinking is that you need three threats and combination of LP and PER to keep the defense honest. By three powerful scorers I mean a guard and a big man like you described, along with a third player who is a legitimate dual threat like a SF with at least 50-60 is ath/speed/LP/Per/BH. I have tried different things with the triangle and it seemed to work better when I kept the distro to my best three scorers.

Yes ideally you have 1 LP threat, 1 Per threat, and 1 other threat, however it can still be effective with just 1 or 2 scoring threats pulling heavy distro's. Most of my past triangle teams have had either only 1-2 and I've made S16's and Elite 8's relying almost completely on 1 or 2 scorers.

Good information here, but I would suggest that it would be easy to over-cook your implementation of it. Personally, I interpret flex & triangle as requiring more passing than either motion or FB, but it's clear that triangle allows you to more effectively place more distro on your primary scorers than on motion will allow. There is something to the notion that, if you wanted to recruit ATH, BH & P, but cut corners on LP, then you are probably better off playing flex or motion than triangle, but it's not night & day.

Posted by rogelio on 4/11/2016 10:53:00 AM (view original):
Good information here, but I would suggest that it would be easy to over-cook your implementation of it. Personally, I interpret flex & triangle as requiring more passing than either motion or FB, but it's clear that triangle allows you to more effectively place more distro on your primary scorers than on motion will allow. There is something to the notion that, if you wanted to recruit ATH, BH & P, but cut corners on LP, then you are probably better off playing flex or motion than triangle, but it's not night & day.

why would you say flex and triangle require more passing, the motion requires the most passing of any offense?

Posted by the0nlyis on 4/11/2016 12:57:00 PM (view original):

Posted by rogelio on 4/11/2016 10:53:00 AM (view original):
Good information here, but I would suggest that it would be easy to over-cook your implementation of it. Personally, I interpret flex & triangle as requiring more passing than either motion or FB, but it's clear that triangle allows you to more effectively place more distro on your primary scorers than on motion will allow. There is something to the notion that, if you wanted to recruit ATH, BH & P, but cut corners on LP, then you are probably better off playing flex or motion than triangle, but it's not night & day.

why would you say flex and triangle require more passing, the motion requires the most passing of any offense?

That's not quite a question, just a reiteration of your original statement, with which I do not agree. However, putting together a team of bad passers in any system is a very bad idea. The result would be more turnovers and lower team FG%; bad. So, on my central point, you can read too much into this discussion.

Depending on how we sliced the question (position by position or team average), we would agree more than disagree on this point.

The two national championships I won with DePauw (running Triangle/Press) had some of the best pass ratings of any team I've ever had.

While I think Motion *needs* good passers, Triangle is *most efficient* with good passers.

I think a small forward with either high LP or high PER can be beneficial in a triangle system as well. ATH and BH (and SPD) definitely help too.

The notion that ATH/BH/P can't cut corners in triangle is definitely not true with guards, especially 2's. Also can be the case with the right 3.

2's with high ATH/SPD/BH can be effective scorers in a Triangle offense. PER/LP are definitely significant boosters though--and at the right ratings in DIII, can make up for slack in any of the three aforementioned categories.

I think the notion of trying to hammer down 3-4 core ratings that define a Triangle is kind of silly though and bound to be arbitrary/extremely subjective.

Triangles benefit from well-rounded teams--they're effective with FCP's because you can have three-five scorers (I like to have two-three talented scoring options in my starting lineup, then at least 1-2 off the bench who can rotate in) and then can have other facilitators on the team who are defensive specialists/rebounding specialists/passing specialists/etc. Having guys with fast hands who can force turnovers and bring it down the court, then getting set into a quick triangle tends to throw opponents off-balance--if you have the ATH/SPD/DEF to force that high pressure game. It's also less turnover prone than the motion when you go uptempo (if you're running FCP in conjunction). That's why most teams that run motion either run man or zone.

Would you stack 3 guys with distribution? Or is it set evenly to everyone like in other offensives

Conventional wisdom for triangle is to stack 3 guys but triangle works well with a more egalitarian distribution, like 13, 10, 10, 7, 5 for your starters and 8, 6, 3, 2, 2, 1, 0 for the bench.

Yeah, I wouldn't "stack" three guys on a traditional team...but what we need to remember is there are different ways to play the triangle depending on how you recruit and what kind of depth you have.

I think I agree with rogelio here, if I'm understanding where this discussion is. I don't have much to add specifically to a triangle discussion, because I'm only just starting to dabble in it.

My unscientific observation is passing becomes more important as your number of scoring options decrease, and maybe also in a slowdown setting. Some sets may favor more scoring options (or punish bottlenecking distribution less), but I think the original principle holds true in any set, generally. If you only have one or two guys set up to score at any given time, the passing ratings of the non-scorers is going to matter more. If they're all play-makers, and you can set distribution fairly evenly, then team passing may matter less.

So Shoe, if I follow your logic, you need, even if you think your third option or fourth option are not good, to get more distro into 3 and 4 so the triangle runs properly?

It's something I have done. I went 8 (LP player), 6 (slasher) 3 (PG), 2 (SF), 1 (BACK-UP PG), 1 60PER Bench warmer.

That was my distro so my starting five had 15 pts of the distro, my back-ups, 2.

Maybe I need to go by 5 now. I am thinking 5 to 25, 25 being the highest.

On my team I have my PF and C both good options, my SG is a good option, and my backup Guard is a good option. My distro goes like SG(6), PF(5), C(5), Backup Guard(5), my PG is at 2, and my backup C is at 2, all of my other guys are at 1. Idk how the triangle offense runs when my backups are in.