Say what you will about the hallowed “Princeton offense” that Bill Carmody brings from the Ivy League to the shores of Lake Michigan at Northwestern. But do not, under any circumstance, call it the s-word.
“Quit referring to it as a system,” Carmody demands. “What’s to get a handle on? There’s no handle here. Just basketball, passing and cutting and when you’re open, shoot the ball.”
Since arriving in Evanston, Carmody has answered countless questions about the offense, famed for helping take teams with solid but not mind-numbing athletic skill into the upper echelon of college basketball.
And time and time again, he has said that the offense is simpler than many make it out to be. He often says the offense is nothing more than finding the open man and getting him the ball.
But offenses nationwide are about finding the open man. What makes this offense different is how the five players on the court work together to find the open man, the open shot.
Carmody has on his staff three assistant coaches who have nearly as much experience with the offense as he does. Paul Lee has come from Columbia, where the Lions ran a variation of the Princeton offense. And Craig Robinson and Mitch Henderson both played at Princeton. They, as much as anyone, know the difficulties of getting players to understand exactly what needs to happen to make the offense click.
“We don’t really have any plays, first of all,” Henderson says.
That alone is enough to raise an eyebrow or two. But the explanation follows, and to understand it is to grasp truth from the fog of the Princeton mystique.
“We just kind of give them the whole framework and then they have to do what they do given what the defense does,” says Robinson, the fourth-leading scorer in Princeton history. “Whatever the defense does there are probably a couple of choices that you get. It’s like a fork in the road. It’s like a linear program. ‘If this happens, then this might happen.’
“You try to show them all the options and hope they make the right decision on their own. Once you give it to them, you can’t tell them each option from the bench. They have to be able to read it.”
For players to “read it,” then, is the challenge of this offense. Both Robinson and Henderson say the style of basketball can take two or three years to truly master. They note that the options within the offense aren’t that complicated, but learning to see them — and more importantly to believe in them — can be the most difficult part.
“The best way to learn this offense is just reps. Do it over and over again,” Robinson says. “It’s like accounting. I know when I took accounting I didn’t understand it and then after the midterm or before the final it just clicked. And that usually happens in your second to third year of doing this. And then you just kind of figure it out, the timing.”
The timing of the offense is difficult. But the movement on the floor is not impossible to comprehend.
The guard bringing the ball upcourt wants to feed the ball to a forward positioned on the wing, who then wants to find the center on the low blocks. That sequence, usually the first option in the linear progression of the offense, is surprisingly similar to some schools’ throw-it-inside philosophy.
“A lot of what Big Ten teams seem to do is pound it in, and we play a physical brand of ball too,” Henderson says in reference to the many screens and picks players set all over the floor. “It’s just that we really stress throwing it to the open man, making the right pass all the time, making the pass that a guy can catch for a shot. It’s just precision and attention to detail.”
That statement holds the key to discerning between this and a more traditional college offense. While teams might try and force the ball to the center if he’s a go-to guy, this offense encourages its players to move right on to the next option.
Or options, as it were.
“If you can’t do that, send your guard through and then you might throw it to a center. Really, it’s just a three-man game,” Henderson says, his speech growing faster as he flashes through the various alternatives. “Different pockets — you can screen away, you can cut, you an cut over the top and then you try and get a little back-door pass. Or if you screen away, you can cut back door or you can cut down the middle. You might throw it over to the guy cutting through.”
In slightly more understandable terms, most of the time the Cats will be involved in a delicate three-man game, with the actors in that game constantly changing depending on where the ball is. If the guard bringing the ball down the floor can’t get it to the wing, expect to see the off-guard cut under the basket and toward the point guard’s side of the floor. Meanwhile, the center heads away from the low post to the elbow, looking for a pass from the point guard. From there, the big man can distribute the ball or find a shot as he sees fit.
“When he comes up to the elbow, he’s trying to find open guys,” Carmody says. “What happens with a lot of teams, you have four guys trying to get one guy a shot, the center. And I don’t like four guys working for this one guy. I like it so there’s one guy trying for four other guys.”
If the point guard doesn’t get the ball to the center at the elbow, he more often than not will spin back toward the sideline. And out of this move comes the most intriguing and most famed part of the offense — the back-door cut.
As the point guard dribbles to the side, the forward on that wing cuts to the basket. If the defender on the wing isn’t paying attention to the ball, the back-door cut will be there for the taking.
“If he’s cutting to the basket and the ball’s right there, if the defender is not looking at the ball we just say, ‘Throw it,'” says Henderson, who started at point guard on the Princeton team that beat defending national champion UCLA in the 1996 NCAA Tournament on a back-door cut. “We tell our guys, ‘If he’s not looking, just throw it right by his ear. Throw it. Nobody ever sees it, nobody ever steals it.'”
That is not, of course, the end of the linear progression. Henderson speaks of four, five and sometimes six options for the ball-handler at any one time. But the outside shot, the back-door cut and the entry pass to the post are three primary options.
Speaking from experience, the coaches say the results can be unforgettable if the Cats choose to embrace the system — ahem — offense.
“It’s like we’re teaching a bunch of kids a new language. As soon as they get exposed to it and start speaking it, they’ll be like anybody else,” Robinson says. “I have no patience for playing with guys who want to take the ball one-on-one all the time. I like the teamwork of it, I like the beauty of it and I like beating guys who are better then me. When you finally get this and you realize that you can use this to be competitive, that’s when it’s really fun. We’ve beaten some really good teams, and there’s nothing like it.”
