| Princeton Offense [Uncertain Principles] |
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Written by 2000l, March 31st, 2007
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There’s a nice article about former Princeton coach Pete Carril and the motion offense popularly associated with his teams:
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.
He’s right, of course– the “Princeton offense” is just basketball, and the basic idea is pretty simple: you never stop moving. It’s devastating when it’s done well. Or even not that well– I used to play occasionally with my friend Dave in college, and he was astonishingly effective for a guy with no significant talent for the game beyond an ability to hit a wide-open two-hand set shot. You woul;dn’t think that would get you very far, but he used to literally run in circles around the three-point line, never stopping, until his man would get fed up with chasing him and drop back into the middle. And then, next thing you know, he would be wide open, hitting that goddamn set shot…
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