BILL HAS A NEW COACH:

For Bill Carmody the shock came just more than a year ago, on a cool November evening in the Piedmont. Carmody is the basketball coach at Northwestern, but he's known in coaching circles as the caretaker of the Princeton offense, the classic labyrinthine scheme he learned at the feet of Hall of Famer Pete Carril. On that night in Raleigh, Carmody and his assistants were astonished when they sat down to scout the second game of the Black Coaches Association Invitational. North Carolina State was using the Princeton offense. Their offense. Every bit of the breathtaking minuet: its backdoor cuts and dribble handoffs, its fade screens and wide-open layups. The Wolfpack had it down cold.

"Wow. They're running it," Carmody whispered, pen frozen in hand. "And they have the perfect guys to do it, skillful guys who can dribble and pass and shoot and cut."

But how did they get it? This wasn't something you could lift from a few viewings of videotape. And why now? For decades nobody had bothered to imitate Carril's offense. Oh, Princeton had its moments--winning the 1975 NIT, nearly upsetting Georgetown in the '89 NCAA tournament, knocking out defending national champion UCLA in '96--but most coaches derided Carril's slowdown style as little more than a gimmick. "People thought you couldn't teach it to athletic players. They wouldn't have the patience," says N.C. State associate head coach Larry Hunter. Even when Princeton's run to a No. 8 ranking in '98 sparked new levels of national interest, the Sons of Carril kept their secrets in the family. "It's hard to get in," says Campbell University coach Billy Lee, one of dozens who tried, "kind of like the Mafia."

Suddenly, though, the secret not only got out, but it morphed into a genuine basketball movement. The New Jersey Nets reached last year's NBA Finals using a faithful copy of the Princeton playbook. Likewise, that N.C. State team made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 11 years, saving coach Herb Sendek's job. A high school outfit in Monument, Colo., Lewis-Palmer, had won 61 of its last 67 games through Sunday with the offense, while women's teams at Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Xavier were thriving under it too. At rural Gibson Southern High in Fort Branch, Ind., coach Jerry O'Brien puts his Titans through the Princeton paces, and even the district's sixth-graders run the offense. "It's good fundamental basketball," Nets coach Byron Scott says. "But it's different, and that's why it's special."

And it keeps spreading, not just through the NBA--in which the Sacramento Kings, Milwaukee Bucks and Minnesota Timberwolves also are employing Princeton concepts--but through every level of the game (map, pages 60-61). In addition to the programs run by coaches with ties to Carril (Princeton, Northwestern, Air Force), a growing number of Division I colleges have adopted the offense, from big-conference powers (N.C. State) to successful mid-majors (Miami of Ohio, George Mason, Samford) to smaller programs (Campbell, Eastern Washington, Western Carolina) hoping to ride it to the NCAA tournament. Why, even go-go Florida and Louisville, two of the nation's most explosive offensive teams, are running some of the trademark Princeton sets. 

Yet Carmody watched N.C. State that night in Raleigh with mixed emotions. On the one hand, here was a moment to enjoy the ultimate in professional respect--imitation, of course, being the sincerest form of flattery. Yet he was also stricken by a deep and abiding fear. After all, as the Princeton offense goes mainstream, won't defenses become more adept at stopping it? In the long run, won't its triumph, in a misdirection play worthy of the scheme itself, sow the seeds of its own demise? Ruin its novelty? Forever save defenses from death by a thousand cuts?

"I like seeing the Nets run this stuff," Carmody says, his Conan O'Brien features tightening with angst, "but in a perfect world I'd prefer that no one else did it."

This is a story about basketball, but it is also about innovation, human nature and the fanatical drive to attain--and sustain--a competitive advantage. Above all, this is the story of a philosophy and its wholly unexpected transformation into a burgeoning fad. How did the oldest of old school game plans, an arcane quirk shrouded in secrecy, turn into what the New York Daily News recently called the "trendy" Princeton offense?

Like the rise of fashion vogue and the movement of the latest flu virus, the spread of the Princeton offense is best viewed as a social epidemic. In his groundbreaking best-seller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes the three types of agents responsible for social epidemics: Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen. "In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message," Gladwell writes. "Connectors are the social glue: They spread it. But there is also a select group of people--Salesmen--with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing."

For the Princeton offense to spread, it needed all three types: Mavens outside the Carril "family" to decipher and master every nuance of the scheme; Connectors to spread that knowledge to coaches across the country; and Salesmen to persuade the hoops cognoscenti that it could be successful at every level of the game, for high schoolers and pros, men and women, in up-tempo and slowdown attacks. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

Pete Carril was hired as a Sacramento Kings assistant

CARRIL, THIRD FROM LEFT, AS AN ASSISTANT COACH WITH THE SACRAMENTO KINGS IN THE NBA.

ZUMA PRESS/IMAGO IMAGES

THE INNOVATOR

What is the Princeton offense? Master Yoda laughs. Pete Carril is 72 years old. His wispy white hair, throaty rasp and impish grin conspire to make him appear more gnomelike than ever. He's wearing a Kings sweatshirt--he has been an assistant for the team since 1996--and a baseball cap that reads yo! on the front. "I don't think it's that innovative," he says, all evidence to the contrary. "The basic difference [between this system and others] is that there's a greater use of cutting, and not much picking. It's supposed to take the tension out of a game, so five guys aren't just complaining about getting enough touches, all that bulls---. You know the ball's going to come to you at the right time. If you're not skillful you can't play in this offense, because everyone is the point guard. The minute you have the ball in your hand, you're expected to see what to do, to read the defense."

To hear Carril tell it, his offense is a hodgepodge of borrowed philosophies. When he began coaching at Easton (Pa.) High in 1952, his teams ran the five-man weave used by La Salle's Ken Loeffler and Villanova's Al Severance. "As it went on, we picked up things," Carril says. There was the shuffle cut run by Albany's Dick Sauers, the low-post elbow screen run by Red Auerbach's Boston Celtics ("Sam Jones hit so many bank shots coming off that elbow screen") and the dribble handoffs of Red Holzman's New York Knicks. From Butch van Breda Kolff, his predecessor at Princeton, Carril borrowed another touch, moving his center from the low post to the high post and clearing space in the lane for backdoor cuts.

Carril's genius was in the way he seamlessly linked all those sets, forcing opponents to pick their poison, like a soccer goalkeeper who has to move one way or the other when facing a penalty kick: Do you want to give up open outside shots, or do you want to defend the perimeter and be bamboozled by backdoor layups? Combined with Princeton's monotonous pace, the approach always gave Carril's teams, without the benefit of athletic scholarships, a chance to beat the best teams in college basketball. "Coach Carril has been very effective at choreographing sequential movement in ways that create counters to counters," says Gary Walters, the Princeton athletic director who played for Carril in high school. "When you defend one portion of the sequence, you set yourself up for having more trouble defending the next step."

The offense isn't for everyone, of course, particularly at a time when mastery of fundamentals has reached an alltime low. In its purest form, it requires a center who can shoot from the outside and deliver one-handed bounce passes on a dime to backdoor cutters. It requires an agile power forward who can cut, pass and shoot, since the offense makes no distinctions between its four nonpost players. Not least, it requires selfless players who can think. "It's very time consuming," Carmody says. "I don't spend any time in practice on defense. At all. Ever. But you're always guarding the other team in practice, so we get it done."

Over three decades and 525 wins, naturally, Carril realized there was treasure in the Princeton playbook, and he developed a pathological fear that rivals would steal his creation. Wasn't that why he had closed his practices all those years? Why, in a violation of coaching protocol, he often refused to exchange game tapes with other schools? Why, whenever another coach called to inquire about the offense, Carril would unleash a volley of invective ("Do what I did, and f------figure it out!") and hang up the phone?

THE MAVEN

The first outsider to infiltrate Princeton's inner circle was Jimmy Tillette. This was in 1996, when Tillette was an assistant at Samford, a Baptist college in Birmingham. An avowed egghead and lover of Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner--he named his son Tristan after the hero of Wagner's opera--Tillette is possessed of a relentless curiosity about all things hoops. In other words he's the perfect Maven. "I'm the only coach in Alabama who doesn't play golf," Tillette says. "I had to do something in the spring, and I always liked to take another team and figure out how they do what they do. So one spring I picked out Princeton." For weeks Tillette spent six hours a day poring over tapes, compiling 99 pages of notes and then distilling those into 35 laminated sheets.

When Princeton and Samford each appeared at the Iowa State Holiday Classic in December 1995, Tillette joined Carril and Carmody for dinner. Intrigued by Tillette's notebook, Carmody invited him to Princeton the following year, after Carmody had taken over for Carril. "Tillette was the guy we talked with a lot," Carmody says. "Every day I get four or five e-mails, phone calls or letters: Can you send me your offense? I just throw 'em in the garbage. I can't deal with that, because, you know ... do something. Work with it. That's what Jimmy did. He already knew the stuff, where to go and what to do, but he didn't quite get all of it. So he came up, and we spent a couple of days together."

The results were startling. In 1998-99, Tillette's second season as Samford's head coach, the Bulldogs went 24-6 and reached the NCAA tournament--a feat they had not accomplished in six years under Tillette's predecessor, John Brady, who had left for LSU. The next year Samford went 21-11, led the nation in field goal percentage (50.3) and made another trip to the NCAAs. "The concept is so solid," Tillette says. "You don't have to beat guys off the dribble or go one-on-one. It's a question of sharing the ball. Our assists-to-baskets ratio is out of sight. Three out of four baskets come off an assist." So dazzling was Samford that Carmody's brother Frank called him one night and said, "Hey, Billy, you ought to watch these guys: They're running it better than you are!"

Though Samford's surge drew some small-scale media attention, it hardly spurred a national wave of converts to the Princeton offense. Tillette simply honored Carmody's request to keep it in the family. At one point Tillette even rebuffed Birmingham Southern coach Duane Reboul, a friend of 40 years and his former boss at De La Salle High in New Orleans. "I'm very aware of my loyalty to Princeton," Tillette says. "If you want to watch practice and glean some things on your own, that's fine. But I'm not one for sharing."

To find a coach who is, you need to fly to Columbus, Ohio, rent a car and drive 90 minutes east, to the tiny, brick-paved burg of New Concord, proud home of Senator John Glenn and Division III Muskingum College.

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