When Did Basketball Get Wings? | Defector

One of my favorite things about basketball is the wide variety of positional descriptors that it provides. Anyone who finds themselves bored or under-informed by the standard positions can always reach for more specificity. The sport has its rim-protectors, slashers, playmakers, pick-and-pop bigs, roll men, combo guards, on-ball defenders, floor-spacers, etc. But no descriptor is as clean and evocative as the wing.

When a player is described as a wing, that single word tells you just about everything you need to know about their physical profile and skillset. Wings are guards but not point guards, forwards but not power forwards. They have a long wingspan, they are athletic, and they are adaptable. Wings must have an affinity either for shotmaking or defending, and in the best cases they possess both. A player who has some of these traits, but lacks too many others, is not a wing. Kevin Durant is a wing, whereas Michael Porter, Jr. is not. Jayson Tatum is a wing, but Luka Doncic is not. Paul George? Now there’s a guy who is a wing. Giannis Antetokounmpo? Sorry, sir, but you are not a wing.

A good wing can take you a long way in this era of the NBA, as evidenced by the Boston Celtics building a historically dominant championship roster around two do-it-all wings in Tatum and Jaylen Brown. We are in the Age Of The Wing, and likely will remain here until human evolution allows for the creation of multiple Victor Wembanyamas.

When considering the all-importance of the modern NBA wing, I got to wondering when the wing first arrived as a concept in the sport. Who was the first ball coach who found himself standing in a gym, hair slicked back and sweat bleeding through his suit jacket, watching a rangy, 6-foot-something player dribble the ball up one side of the floor in a few easy motions before bursting to the rim to lay the ball in? “By golly, that feller there is a hell of wing!” I imagine this coach muttering to himself. So I resolved to try and discover the first usage of the word “wing” as a descriptor for a basketball player.

As is the case with all meaningful journeys, this one began with bothering Ray Ratto. Given my comrade’s depth of sportswriting experience and ball-knowing, he seemed like a good person to first pose the question to. “I believe it started with Tex Winter’s triangle offense, which wasn’t original (but the term ‘wing’ was as far as I know),” is the answer he gave me. That seemed like a good enough place to start.

Unsurprisingly, Ray started me on the right track. A dive into the newspaper archives brought up a small clipping that seemed to indicate that the wing has a specific connection to the triangle offense. On the sports page of the Nov. 24, 2000 edition of The Desert Sun, a box headlined “Lakers Notes” offers this bit of information: “Kobe Bryant, the focal point of the early-season Lakers’ discussion, was moved from shooting forward—or, as its often referred to in Phil Jackson’s triangle offense, the wing—back to shooting guard Wednesday night against Golden State.”

I had more trouble than I would have guessed finding additional uses of the term in sports pages published before the ’90s. Given that the triangle offense, first known as the triple-post offense, was invented by Sam Barry in the 1940s and refined by Tex Winter in the late ’50s and early ’60s, it seemed odd that it would take 30 years for “wing” to find a regular spot in the basketball lexicon. A trip to the source revealed the issue: Before there were wings in basketball, there were wing men.

Winter published a book on his and Barry’s offensive philosophy in 1962 called The Triple-Post Offense. The book contains all sorts of diagrams and drill descriptions for running the triangle offense, and some of them make mention of players acting as “wing men” or “wing-men” within the offense. The description under one drill diagram reads: “This is done in the three-man drill and in the five-man drill by having the two men that start out ‘wing-men’ come back to the middle of the floor as defensive men against the next group that is breaking.” Wow, reading about the triangle offense is almost as boring as watching it.

Variations of “wing men” and “wing man” being used the context of basketball were much easier to find in the sports pages of yore. A Dec. 16, 1965 article from the Tyler Morning Telegraph detailed the results of a preseason coaches poll in an East Texas high school basketball league. A section of the article describing Sabine High School’s roster calls out the presence of “Eddie Shawn, a 6-0 soph wingman with a deadly eye for the basket.”

A Dec. 27, 1966 article from the Ames Tribune promised the Iowa town’s sports fans were in for a “real treat” at that evening’s “Wrestling and Basketball Jamboree,” which pitted the wrestling and basketball teams from Ames High against those from a high school in the nearby town of Nevada. The article made mention of Nevada’s basketball coach, Gary Kolbeck, and a certain position that was specific to the style of offense he ran. “Kolbeck indicated that he would start John Peterson, 6’2 senior at center along with Keith Tillotson, 6′ sr. and Tom Wissler, 6′ at the forwards or the wing-men as they are called in the Kolbeck offense.”

Skip ahead a few years, to 1972, and you can find Sports Illustrated previewing the college basketball season with a discussion of legendary UCLA coach John Wooden constructing his whole damn team out of wings:

Wooden will continue his swarming “containment” defense and one-guard-with-wingmen offense. The rebounding wing is Dave Meyers, a local boy whom Wooden calls “my gangly colt—he’s getting it together.” Contesting the point position are Tommy Curtis, the bowlegged fireball who ignited the Bruins to their NCAA title victory over Florida State last March, and sophomore Andre McCarter. Curtis, “an inspirational, crazy guy” according to one teammate, never lets a team rest—his own or the opponents’; he is probably ahead of McCarter, who has as much physical equipment as any backcourt man in the land. At the shooting wing senior Larry Hollyfield has experience and 40 pounds on sophomore Pete Trgovich, whose floppy body, Serbian features and innovative moves are the image of another Pete named Maravich.

Sports Illustrated

At this point I was fairly satisfied that the wing as a positional concept was birthed by Barry, Winter, and other adherents to the triangle offense, and had its descriptor shortened from the clunky “wing man” to the more elegant “wing” as the language of basketball evolved over time. This conclusion left me cold. Could it be that my favorite piece of basketball jargon was created by the fusty architect of the dreadfully tedious triangle offense, and then further popularized by Phil Jackson, one of the most annoying guys to ever coach in the NBA?

This couldn’t be the end result. I had to push on in search of a more ancient history, of some piece of evidence that long before Tex Winter ever stood in front of the Kansas State hoops team and started drawing triangles on a whiteboard, there existed some primordial hoops-knower, one who witnessed the game in its earliest form and understood where the wing fit into it. That quest brought me to an article from the San Francisco Call And Post, published April 8, 1894. The headline is simply “Basket-Ball.” The subhead reads: “A Game That Is Becoming Popular. How Is It Played.” Here is the article’s answer to that question:

What is basket-ball? is a question now frequently being asked, because this style of amuse-ment has grown quite popular. Basket-ball was got up by James Norsmith, an instructor at the Springfield (Mass.) Training-school. The game is played by seven men on a side. These are arranged in order from the goal they defend. Each player is not required to keep strictly in his place, but should always be found in the territory assigned to him. The object of the two wing men is to get a favorable position from which to throw the ball into the opponent basket and to assist one another in the matter.

San Francisco Call And Post

“Get a favorable position from which to throw the ball into the opponent basket and to assist one another in the matter” is exactly what Tatum and Brown do. “James Norsmith,” and whoever wrote this article, must be smiling down on them from heaven right now.