Phil Jackson: the Zen Master of eleven titles

Phil Jackson never coached like anyone else. Drawing on ideas from Zen Buddhism and Native American philosophy, he treated his teams as much as a group of minds to be harmonised as a set of players to be drilled. He handed his stars books to read, spoke about mindfulness and the value of being present, and sought to lower the noise around high-pressure situations. Where others relied on fear or fury, Jackson tried to build calm, trust and a shared sense of purpose, and the results were extraordinary.

At the heart of his approach was the triangle offence, a system built with his assistant that spread scoring responsibility across the team and demanded that every player read the game and move together. It discouraged over-reliance on any single individual, even when that individual was one of the greatest ever, and forced stars to trust their teammates. Married to Jackson's psychological touch, the system turned collections of talented, sometimes difficult players into cohesive, ruthless champions.

Jackson's record is staggering. He won six championships with the Chicago Bulls, guiding an all-time great and his supporting cast through two separate three-peats, then moved to the Los Angeles Lakers and won five more titles across two spells. Eleven championships as a head coach stands as the most in league history, achieved with two entirely different franchises and generations of players. No coach has ever presided over sustained winning on quite such a scale.

Jackson's rarest skill was handling the egos of superstars, coaxing the game's most talented and strong-willed players to sacrifice for the collective. He absorbed tension, deflected pressure and kept fractious groups pointed at the same goal, season after season. His legacy is a lesson that coaching at the highest level is as much about psychology as tactics. The Zen Master proved that the hardest part of winning is not designing plays but uniting people, and no one ever did it better.