IF you've been closely watching Barangay Ginebra games in recent years, you may probably be wondering: where is the triangle offense?
The basketball offensive system developed by the late Tex Winter was used with great success by Tim Cone at Alaska from 1989 to 2011, and the next five years at Magnolia, where he won an unprecedented 18 PBA championships incuding two grand slams.

But in a short chat with SPIN.ph, Cone admitted that he has not been running the triangle since 2016, a year after his surprise move to Ginebra from Magnolia.
Why?
“The modern game has been so fast and so up tempo it was so hard to play the slower tempo of the triangle,” said Cone, adding the switch did not happen overnight.
“Five years ago, we scrapped it (triangle offense) and started going for continuity. I still use a little bit of triangle principles, things I’ve learned from the triangle and we try to implement that in our continuity, kinda blend it in, so we developed our kind of little own offense,” he added.
Six championships with Barangay Ginebra prove the success of the new system, whose bits and pieces are dictated his players on the floor and their opponent’s game plan.
“We adjust a lot, we do different things, we’re a little bit more open to a lot of things rather than just stay with the triangle that's just a complete system, but we didn’t go too far from it,” he added.
“Now we have this tendency to adjust to our opponent and that kinda gave me a wider game plan,” he said.
Cone bared that one of the reasons why he ditched the triangle offense was the quality of talent that he had at Ginebra. The shift became even more imperative upon the arrival of Justin Brownlee, his famed Governors’ Cup import since 2016.
That clinched it.
“We got Justin Brownlee and we kinda do some special things for Justin, and of course, we have Greg (Slaughter) & Japeth (Aguilar),” he said.
His longtime consultant Kirk Collier also had a hand in developing the new offense, Cone said.
“He has some really good ideas on the continuity of offense. Now, we have a tendency to change according to our opponent and that kinda gave me what I want to play. We talk about it as continuity,” he said.
The new offensive system has brought Cone consisderable success, but the most successful coach in PBA history broke into a hearty laugh when asked what the new system is called.
“I don’t know,” he chuckled.
“We call it as ‘run-out continuity’, we blended it in. We started doing it because we wanted to up-tempo the game a little bit more, we started calling it run-outs, from the run-outs we started going into continuity. So apparently, we came in to what we call Run-out Continuity” he said.
“But it is not a system like the triangle by any means," he added. "But it is something that we kinda do the basic of what we do… then we build on top of that."
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