Although he is reluctant to accept the …

Although he is reluctant to accept the credit, Tomjanovich is responsible for introducing the predecessor to the “pace-and-space” era that is prevalent today by turning small forward Robert Horry into a stretch power forward to complement Hakeem Olajuwon and give him room to operate. Tomjanovich admits that the innovation was created more out of developing a scheme to defend Barkley without double-teaming than some prescient vision. “We thought could give the other teams problems and when we moved Robert Horry,” Tomjanovich said. “Robert did a great job. He started his string of big shots against San Antonio. He made a big one at the buzzer there and he had a tremendous career. When you put a shooting big out there, whoa, they really have to rotate a long way. That’s basically what we saw there. And then, we really used it a lot after the championship runs with the guards, so that we could get penetration and we always looked for shooting. We didn’t have the computerized stuff at that time.”