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Basketball the Princeton way

Posted: Wednesday February 12, 2003 12:58 PM

Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl answers your college basketball questions every Wednesday. Click here to send him a question.

If you check out this week's Sports Illustrated, you'll see the fruit of some extensive (some might say manic) labors: the 'Bag's 4,500-word opus on the wholly unexpected spread of the Princeton-style offense through every level of basketball. After spending six weeks interviewing more than 125 coaches, from the New Jersey Nets' Byron Scott to N.C. State's Herb Sendek to Donnie Quinn of West Monroe (La.) High's girls' team, I can safely say that Hall of Famer Pete Carril's creation has turned into a genuine basketball movement.

Now that the Nets and N.C. State have proved you can win with Princeton and still score points, the baroque, backcut-heavy system is the latest hoops fad. For god's sakes, even Florida is using two of the Princeton sets: the "Chin" and the low-post series. "It was good for our team with the loss of Udonis Haslem," Billy Donovan told me, adding that he had visited with Nets assistant Eddie Jordan about the offense last summer. "To do it, your 4 and 5 man have to be able to pass and handle the ball, and Matt Bonner and David Lee are phenomenal at that."

In the end, I tracked down 101 teams around the country running either pure Princeton or something not far from it, which I never would have predicted 10 years ago when I was covering the Tigers for the student newspaper. Back then, it was viewed as little more than a slowdown gimmick by other coaches, and those who were interested were shut out by the hypersecretive Carril.

Now the secret is out, thanks to coaches who have 1) put in the hundreds of hours necessary to piece together the offense through videotape, and/or 2) been willing to share their secrets with other coaches who are eager to learn.

A few testimonials:

Miami (Ohio) assistant James Whitford, on the RedHawks' first year with the offense: "It's a real evolution in the game. We're a ways away from getting it down, but this is the best s--- I've ever seen in my life."

Coach Tom Connell, whose Edina (Minn.) High team went 21-5 last year: "I have a passion for it that's borderline sick. My kids started calling me [Brian] Billick because I get so excited about it."

Coach Bob Ward of Ross High in Hamilton, Ohio, who started mastering the offense when he was an assistant to Cal Luther at Tennessee-Martin in the mid-1990s: "I like sharing it, so I probably get as many calls about it as anyone. Not a day goes by that I don't get a request for tapes."

After retiring to Florida, Luther met the coach at local Satellite Beach High and taught him the offense. When Satellite Beach played at the team camp run by Division I Stetson, the Stetson coaches were so enamored with the offense that they invited Luther to spend a day teaching them the scheme.

Phil Stern, Maryland-Baltimore County's women's coach: "I'm surprised more people in the women's game haven't picked up on it, because it fits women even better than men. Our game is played below the rim. It's a game of fundamentals."

Coach Lee Bennett, whose Dakota (Ill.) High team was 17-0 when I called him a couple weeks ago: "We started it four years ago. We're not big, and you could see our future was as a perimeter-shooting team. The biggest misconception, though, is that bad players can win with it."

New Mexico coach Ritchie McKay jokes: "[Oklahoma's] Kelvin Sampson always says I'm the only black man running the Princeton offense. But that isn't right. What about John Thompson III at Princeton?"

As Ohio State women's coach Jim Foster says, "We started using it when I was at Vanderbilt, and we led the country in field-goal percentage the last two years. There's hope for good basketball. There's hope!"

Question time

What is wrong with Indiana? The heart and pride that drove last year's Final Four team are gone, the Hoosiers can't rebound, Tom Coverdale and Kyle Hornsby are in season-long shooting slumps -- this is starting to not even look like an NCAA team anymore.
—Justin Adolph, Normal, Ill.

Amazing, isn't it, that several teams considered tournament locks earlier in the season are now struggling just to get there: Indiana, Oregon, Alabama, Michigan State and North Carolina, just to name a few. You already hit on a lot of the problems the Hoosiers are dealing with. The reasons SI didn't have Indiana very high in its preseason rankings were a dubious inside game and questionable overall talent on the perimeter. You could argue that this team relied too much on Bracey Wright early on and has paid the price since he ran into health problems. But the complete disappearance of Hornsby may be the most mystifying part of it all. Indiana can thank some of its early-season wins for even keeping it in the tournament picture.

Why do I hear people talking about the demise of defense? Am I the only person who has watched over the past few years teams like Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, Utah, Michigan State, Ohio State, Mississippi, Texas, Cincinnati, Kentucky, Stanford and Marquette win without having the best talent? If you watch them, you know defense and playing as a team were/are the main reasons for their success.
—Mark Sleiter, Minneapolis

I think you just answered your own question, Mark. If the list of good defensive teams over the past few years is that short, isn't that a sign that something is wrong? I don't think defense is dead (the way GQ and Esquire tell us, every two or three years, that fiction/fashion/whatever is dead), but the number of teams known for good defense is diminishing every year.

"Score the ball" or "Score the basketball" are terms that have been used by announcers and coaches quite a bit of late. I have been around basketball my entire life and never heard this phrase until recently; now it seems you can't watch a game without hearing it. For some reason it really bothers me. I would rather hear just plain, old "score." Sometimes less is more.
—Luke, Chicago

Excellent point, Luke. Anyone who cares about the language should throw up every time they hear the college hoops version of "That's a great golf shot." Another quick (albeit unrelated) beef about broadcasts: I appreciate Dick Vitale's enthusiasm for the game, but if he's so gung-ho on kids staying in school and getting a good education, why does he always talk about how "terrible" and "dumb" he was in school himself? The only message kids get from that is, Look, Dick Vitale's successful, and he didn't care about school, so why should I?

Why is it that no one gives Auburn coach Cliff Ellis any credit?
—Luke Wilmoth, Pensacola, Fla.

I'll be happy to do that. With the collapse of Alabama and the worse-than-expected showing of Mississippi State, the SEC West has been wide open, and Auburn is in a perfect position to ace out both those teams. It's awfully tough to say who'll be Coach of the Year in the SEC (Kentucky's Tubby Smith, Georgia's Jim Harrick, Tennessee's Buzz Peterson and Florida's Billy Donovan have all had fabulous years), but Ellis has to be on the list.

I'm a huge Tennessee fan, but I'm all over the South Carolina State bandwagon (10-0 in the MEAC)! Why? One name: Moses Malone Jr. Please, please, please let the Bulldogs make the NCAAs. Mo Jr. can't say "Fo', fo', fo'," like his dad did 20 years ago, but can he say "Six is in the fix"?
—Terry Doernner, Charleston, S.C.

Having seen first-hand S.C. State play Kentucky in the tournament in 1998, I share your wish to see not just Moses Malone Jr. but the school's high-octane band as well.

While Dayton might be flying under the radar, it is not even the best team in the Atlantic 10. That would be the Saint Joseph's Hawks!
—Ryan, Philadelphia

Hard to say in this year's A-10, Ryan. Xavier has rebounded well, and David West's 47-point extravaganza to beat Dayton last week ranks among the top performances of the year so far. I did talk recently to a member of the NCAA tournament selection committee who had made a special trip to Philly to see Saint Joseph's play, and he came away very impressed with what he saw. I really do hope the A-10 gets its three deserving teams in the tournament (Dayton, Xavier, Saint Joseph's), and Richmond could still be a spoiler if it goes on a tear down the stretch.

Terrible uniforms of the week

And you thought Alabama A&M's uniforms were bad? Several readers wrote in to disparage the bizarre violet tops worn by Kansas State against Kansas last week, jerseys variously described as "a flower arrangement" (Mark Gormely of Chicago) and "something a broke Thursday night city-league team for men over 50 would wear" (Marc Mann of Overland Park, Kan.). No disagreement here.

Thanks also to Craig DeVault of Cary, N.C., for providing a link to the hideous unitards worn by N.C. State in the late 1980s. For this week's 'Bag contest, we ask you to provide the funniest/most appropriate caption for what Rodney Monroe is saying while wearing his unitard. (Top three printable responses will make next week's 'Bag!) Click here to submit your dialogue bubble.

Basketball on film

Received a mountain of responses to my search for bad basketball scenes in movies. My biggest pet peeve (3-point lines in movies set in the 1960s) was echoed by Matt from Annapolis, Md., who points out that Passing Glory "was set in the '60s and had 3-point lines and breakaway rims."

Meanwhile, Martin Barna of Ann Arbor, Mich., chastises the movie version of A Season on the Brink for its attempt to splice footage of actual games with lame filmed sequences. Successfully mixing in real footage is a terribly difficult thing to do, Martin, but in my mind the best example of that working well (aside from Forrest Gump) is in the Steve Prefontaine biopic Without Limits. Billy Crudup did such a remarkable job mimicking Pre's running style that you can't tell the difference between the two during the scenes from the 1972 Olympics. Amazing.

According to you guys, some of the worst basketball scenes around can be found in: Porky's (Dan Meyer of Ancaster, Ontario); The Air Up There (many); Amazing Grace and Chuck (Erick Horning of New Brighton, Minn.); The Hank Gathers Story (Robert Kelly, New York); Fast Break (Ken Woodburn of Richmond, Va.); Love and Basketball (Joel Gerlach of Philadelphia); The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (Spencer Moore of San Francisco); Blue Chips (Dane Petersen of Arlington, Va.); Escape From L.A. (Andrew Warden of Indianapolis); and Heaven Is a Playground (Luke of Chicago).

The response that made me laugh the most came from Don of Atlanta, who nominated Jared Fogle, or as he put it, "the ex-fat guy in the Subway commercials who marvels that after losing all that weight he can do things like play basketball. Then it shows him in the driveway shoving up a ridiculous two-handed, behind-the-ear, ball-in-his-palms push shot in the direction of some imaginary hoop. They don't show where it lands but I'm guessing it was in the middle of Mom's rose bushes."

Station break: Mini-rant

While we're talking movies, was I the only person who was amazed that Adaptation earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay? I fully expected to love a movie which 1) has a contempt for Hollywood cliches, 2) is based on Susan Orlean's remarkable book The Orchid Thief, 3) is written by the same guy, Charlie Kaufman, who did the hilarious Being John Malkovich, and 4) has Meryl Streep in a lead role.

Somehow I left the theater feeling angrier than I had in a long time after seeing a movie. What a fraud -- Kaufmann clearly gave up and turned in a half-baked script, only for some supposedly smart, hip Hollywood type to tell him it was genius. Critics raved, too, and now it's up for an Academy Award. Just one more reason why the Oscars have gone down the drain. (If you're looking for another, check out how many nominations were given to Gangs of New York.)

Upon further review ...

Most readers were cool with last week's list of the top postup players in college hoops. But several of you also nominated Arizona State's Ike Diogu and Maryland's Ryan Randle for the list, and we're O.K. with adding them to the "Also Receiving Votes" category. And a correction: Stanford didn't beat Georgetown two years ago in the NCAA tournament game I referred to; the Cardinal beat Cincinnati.