The Los Angeles Lakers will honor Phil Jackson with a statue outside Crypto.com Arena next season, the team announced Tuesday, recognizing the coach who won five of his record 11 NBA titles in Los Angeles.
The statue will be unveiled April 9, 2027, before the game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. It will be designed and created by Omri Amrany of Rotblatt Amrany Studio, the same firm that created previous Lakers statues.
Acting governor Jeanie Buss said in a statement that Phil Jackson defines championship basketball and that his approach to coaching brought out the best in some of the greatest athletes to play the game. She said it is a great joy to mark his achievement with the statue he deserves.
His Lakers tenure
Jackson, 80, coached the Lakers for 11 seasons across two stints from 1999 to 2004 and from 2005 to 2011, running his triangle offense through Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in the first stint and through Bryant and Pau Gasol in the second.
He won three championships in a row from 2000 to 2002, then added back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010. He guided the team to five titles in seven trips to the NBA Finals during his time with the franchise. His 11 total coaching championships are a record in professional basketball.
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007 and was named one of the 15 greatest coaches in NBA history when the league revealed its coaching selections as part of its 75th anniversary season.
The ninth statue
He will become the ninth figure with a statue at Star Plaza, joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Elgin Baylor, Chick Hearn, Magic Johnson, Pat Riley, Jerry West, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, who has two.
The addition of Jackson to that company is notable. Most franchise statues honor players, and Riley is the only other coach in the group. Five titles in Los Angeles, more than any other coach in franchise history, make the addition significant beyond a ceremonial recognition of longevity.
The broader legacy
Jackson’s coaching career spanned both the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s and the Lakers dynasty of the 2000s and 2010. He won six championships in Chicago with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen before joining the franchise. The combination of both runs puts him in a category occupied by no other coach in professional basketball history.
His triangle offense, developed in partnership with assistant coach Tex Winter, was the tactical framework through which every one of his championship teams operated. The system’s emphasis on player movement, spacing and reading the defense made it adaptable across very different rosters and talent configurations, which is part of what allowed him to win with players as different as Jordan, Bryant, O’Neal and Gasol.
