PRINCETON, N.J., March 28 Pete Carril does not understand the fuss, but he is embarrassed by it. When he began coaching the Princeton basketball team in 1967, he used a play borrowed from the Boston Celtics. He added one from the Knicks. And when those did not work no center at Princeton passed the ball like Bill Russell and no one shot the short bank shot like Sam Jones he devised a few variations.
Now Carril is 76, sitting in an orange seat overlooking the court at Jadwin Gym, talking about how his once-anachronistic Princeton offense has been recast as cool. Georgetown, coached by the Carril disciple John Thompson III, reached this weekend’s Final Four with an offense borrowed from the Ivy League.
Carril has not been a college coach for 11 years. But he is wearing a Georgetown cap, and people keep calling to talk about the precise pass-and-cut offense that he supposedly invented but never called the Princeton offense.
“I didn’t call it anything,” he said.
To him, it is only basketball, and it is not complicated. Carril does not understand why no one talks about other offenses the way they do about Princeton’s. But people are calling him, and they are suddenly curious, as if there is some mystery to be unearthed, a round-ball archeological dig looking for the key to Georgetown’s success.
“I don’t know why this has happened,” Carril said. “I resent it. And I know John resents it more.”
He softened his words. He was in a good mood. “I don’t resent it,” he said. “But it seems ridiculous.”
Carril has been telling people this week, always with a throaty chuckle, what he wants to do with the Princeton offense.
“I’m going to get a bunch of gravediggers and bring them up to Princeton and dig a big hole in the ground, get a coffin and get a skeleton, and put it in the box and then bury the Princeton offense once and for all,” he said.
The Princeton offense has long been viewed with a blend of intrigue and nostalgia. Part of that is because it seems old-fashioned, as if Carril missed the seminar on the game’s evolution. But as everybody else changed, Princeton was different. Princeton was left in a niche.
Success brought attention, just as Georgetown’s run is putting Carril back in focus. From 1967 to 1996, Carril coached Princeton to 13 Ivy League titles and 11 N.C.A.A. tournaments, mostly with a well-rounded cast of unheralded, nonscholarship players. His last victory came in 1996 when Princeton beat U.C.L.A., the defending champion, in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. In 1989, Princeton came closer to knocking off a top seed than any 16th-seeded team before or since, losing by 50-49 to Georgetown.
Now Georgetown, under Thompson III the son of the former Hoyas coach John Thompson Jr. uses the Princeton offense. Thompson III has grown weary of talking about it. He believes the scheme is misunderstood and carries a certain connotation from past Princeton teams, including ones that he played on (1984-88) and coached (as an assistant from 1995-2000 and head coach from 2000-4).
“People say the Princeton offense, and what pops into people’s heads are slow white guys that are going to hold the ball for, you know, 35 or 40 seconds and then take a 3-pointer or get a layup,” said Thompson, who is African-American, before his team beat North Carolina, 96-84, in overtime last Sunday.
He pointed out that several N.B.A. teams, including the Nets, the Washington Wizards and the Sacramento Kings where Carril spent 10 seasons as an assistant after retiring from Princeton have run similar offenses in recent years. Most international offenses resemble Princeton’s more than the typical N.B.A. team’s.
“When I say the Princeton offense, you know, I just think of guys playing together, sharing the ball,” Thompson said. “Talented, unselfish players.”
Yet the Princeton offense is viewed as complicated human crochet, with four perimeter players passing, weaving and rotating around a mobile center. Carril breaks it into three pieces.
One is a play called Celtic. Another is a play called Knick.
“That’s two-thirds of it right there,” Carril said.
The other third consists of six options off those plays various picks, rolls and cuts meant to end with layups or open jump shots.
“It just happened that you go to do something, and you can’t do it, so you have to find something to do because what you try to do initially doesn’t work,” Carril said. “And then the second thing doesn’t work, and then the third thing, until finally you get at a spot where there aren’t any more options. We figured out that we got six things out of that.”
One is the backdoor play which used to be called change of direction, Carril said where a perimeter player zips behind his defender toward the basket. Gabe Lewullis took a backdoor pass from Steve Goodrich for a layup with 3.9 seconds left to beat U.C.L.A., 43-41, in 1996.
Princeton’s notoriously low scores had little to do with the complexity of the offense, but rather the quest for a good shot. Most of Carril’s teams shot about 50 percent from the field. Georgetown this season shot 50.5 percent, fourth best in the nation, and made 57.6 percent from the field against North Carolina.
“Everyone thought the 35-second clock was going to be the demise of Princeton basketball, but it wasn’t,” Carril said. College basketball adopted a 45-second shot clock in 1985, and reduced it to 35 seconds in 1993.
“At practice, I used to put 35 seconds on the clock, and I would tell them to run the entire offense everything we had, at the kind of speed you would run it if somebody were guarding you,” Carril said. “And after going through the entire thing, we still had 8, 10 seconds to go. I did that so that they would learn never to panic.”
Carril believes that Georgetown’s offense would look a lot like it does now if he were the coach instead of Thompson. The more raw talent, the less Carril would try to squeeze players into the system’s mold.
“The basic difference I see is a lesser amount of structure,” Carril said of Georgetown this season versus Princeton of the past. “When they get stuck, they have something to go back to. But because they can make plays individually, they are a lot more effective.”
Carril plans to be in Atlanta for Saturday’s game and, if Georgetown beats Ohio State, for Monday’s final against either Florida or U.C.L.A. He likely will wear his new Georgetown cap, and cheer for Thompson to take the Princeton offense where it has not gone before.
“I’ve said this before,” Carril said. “The measure of any teacher, provided he’s not an egomaniac, is to see anybody that he taught do better than he did.”
And then, maybe it will become the Georgetown offense, and Carril can bury his offense at Princeton, once and for all.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.3