Beng's Idiot's Guide to Northwestern Basketball
One day, there will be a great debate to determinine when basketball’s Three-Point Revolution began. It could be with the first Warriors championship. It could be with the Six Seconds or Less Suns. But there will be no denying that the most audacious, definitive realization of the revolution arrived on February 5, 2020, when the Houston Rockets traded away Clint Capela, their one actual center, for Robert Covington, a tenth shooter. That meant 6-foot-5 PJ Tucker, who not all that long ago would have been a bruising small forward, was now their starting center.
The Houston Rockets under Daryl Morey were more committed to the HoopMath idea of what basketball should look like than any team in history. From their developmental leagues on up, layups, three-pointers, and foul shots were drilled into every player’s head as the only acceptable shots to take on the floor. Behind that tactic and thanks to a broken meta that nonsensically makes certain shots worth one point more despite being no harder to make, the Rockets became one of the best teams in the league despite playing James Harden and a rotating crew of has-beens, never-weres, and never-will-bes who were good at only two or three basketball things.
At this point, the basketball culture war has been won. It is obvious to anyone who watches basketball with any regularity that the game should be built from the outside in and that settling for 16-foot jump shots is making life easy on the defense. The midrange game is dying if it isn’t dead already, and no one in the Basketball Literati will miss it outside the Michael Wilbon types.
The basketball of the future will be played behind the three-point arc. It will not feature post-ups. It will not tolerate lumbering centers.
In 1998, there was a college basketball team that took half of its shots from three, the most in the nation. It shot the highest two-point field goal percentage in the nation, suggesting their looks came from closer in than most any other team. They were third in the nation in turnover rate. Behind a shot chart that we would still call “modern” in 2020, they led the nation in effective field goal percentage and would do so the next year as well. Their defense, while not elite, was elite at forcing turnovers, ending the season 17th in defensive turnover rate.
With that modern shot chart and a combination of ball security and ball-hawking, they maximized both the number of possessions they earned per game while restricting the number of shots their opponents could get.
All of this is the kind of basketball that just about every NBA team is trying to figure out how to play. And yet, this college basketball team that went 26-2 earned no converts. Nowhere will you see this team, who played as close to a 2020 Houston Rockets style of basketball as any team has, cited as an inspiration to the Three-Point Revolution. That’s for two reasons.
They played so slowly that no one wanted to watch them
They were Princeton.
When you start digging into the archives of how that 1998 Princeton team was covered, you find every single obnoxious low-major stereotype you can imagine in peak 1990s sportswriter style.
The needless dime store David Foster Wallace sentence structure.
“Princeton...is a school that has always come at things from a slightly different angle, whether clinging to eating clubs in a frat-house age or lining up in the single-wing offense on the gridiron long into the T formation era. Its basketball teams have been just as iconoclastic, playing a hidebound, earthbound style with a pedigree that can be traced back to the 1940s… ”
The corny nonsense.
“There’s no way something so magical and elegant and admirable can ever be a disappointment, no matter how it ends, no matter that it ended way too soon. In time, I hope the players and coaches, who will be licking their wounds for some time, come to appreciate just how special they and this season were.”
The “they’re smarter” narrative.
“It is a team that plays in almost silent joy, talking to each other more with body movements than with words, with their eyes rather than their mouths. In many cases, they know where each is going before the opposition has time to react.”
People who wrote about that Princeton team at the time were aware they were watching a singularly talented Ivy League team, but they were completely unaware of what was actually occurring. People were too concerned about the technique of a back-cut and a bounce pass to write about anything else. They were too easily consumed by the Made For Disney story of seemingly out-gunned Ivy League boys playing basketball The Right Way.
All of The Text, top to bottom, is written by a man looking back rather than looking forward. The horrific line about Princeton’s eating clubs is an especially transparent example. You couldn’t write two sentences about that Princeton team without talking about the ones that came before it. You couldn’t talk about that Princeton coach without talking about the earlier Princeton coach, Pete Carril. And, yes, sportswriters were hearkening back to a shall we say “paler” era of the game. It was all nostalgia porn, even though all of those writers were looking at a rift in time and at a type of basketball that came two decades earlier than it was supposed to.
There was only this passing line from Markus’s column that came close to appreciating what exactly Princeton had figured out:
The offense still revolves around setting screens and moving without the ball, but the three-point shot is more important now than the backdoor layup,”
Markus doesn’t dig any deeper. It’s just a throwaway line. “This team just likes to shoot more I guess, and there’s an arc on the floor now. Pretty cool. Anyway…”
It’s a glaring omission.
The Princeton offense is ancient. It was and is based on concepts from the 1940s. That all is true. But that specific Princeton team, more than the teams that came before it and more than the teams that came after it when John Thompson III took over for the Tigers, understood, whether by accident or on purpose, that the most efficient kind of basketball requires you to shoot as many threes as twos. If the theory was old, its praxis was aggressively and totally modern.
There are a few notable divergences between how Princeton concepts get their looks and how a modern Rockets-esque team gets theirs. First of all, there is no iso basketball, and there is just about no dribbling period. The pre-Durant Warriors team is an especially glitzy way of imagining how a team can hunt good shots without relying on a one-on-one game.
Second, the team didn’t get to the foul line at all. That flows from the first point. It’s harder to get fouled when you aren’t dribbling.
Third, the pace was glacial. And this point is the sticking point.
There are modern teams that play fast. The best teams realize that if you are better than the team across from you, you should add as many data points (or “possessions” in basketball terms) to the game as possible. The more data points, the more likely the “right” outcome happens. If you flip a coin 10,000 times, you will come fairly close to a 50/50 split. If you flip a coin twice, you could end with a 100/0 split. Removing variance is how you give yourself the best chance to win,
But speed is not a prerequisite of modernity and it shouldn’t be viewed that way. As much as I hate Virginia basketball, they’re not an eyesore because they play slowly, they’re an eyesore because they play plague basketball, forcing teams into the inefficient, gross shot charts that the spreadsheet hates.
And yet, speed is always viewed as modern. For some reason, a fast break that ends in a free-throw pull up is consistently seen as a more modern play than a 23-second possession that ends in a three-pointer from the wing.
That is wrong.
And here is the Northwestern hook.
Princeton’s head coach in 1998 was Bill Carmody. In 2000, Bill Carmody was hired to be the head coach at Northwestern University. From there, he went on to coach the most successful 13-year stretch in Northwestern basketball history. That is not saying much, but it is the truth. By the time Bill Carmody’s final year had ended, it was clear he would not be invited back. The writing on the wall was written in comically large and bright red ink: this old Princeton shit has to go.
When Northwestern hired Chris Collins they began with a fittingly crisp and clean slogan. Chris Collins would begin a “NU Era” (get it?) for Northwestern.
I sat down and listened to Chris Collins’s introductory press conference this week. My first takeaway is that Jim Phillips is an underrated Wet Guy.
My second takeaway is how much Northwestern misjudged Chris Collins but how damn good Chris Collins was at figuring out exactly what Northwestern was looking for. He said the right things. He said it was a “fresh start. A fresh beginning. A new energy.” He was “excited about the future.” The whole press conference and the whole Collins Experiment has been about bringing Northwestern forward through his own brand of Five Year Plan.
Collins was, and is, shiny. He is and was a sparkly new Alfa Romeo. Nice to look at, great to listen to, and probably built on rusted out steel from the 1970s.
Off the court, Chris Collins is modern, certainly more modern than Bill “Allergic to Recruiting” Carmody. Collins brought the program forward. Everything from the way the team traveled to the stadium to the locker room to the uniforms was old and archaic. He accomplished the renovation and capped it with that elusive NCAA Tournament appearance. No one with a brain would deny that.
On the court though, Northwestern is a relic. 34% of Northwestern’s shots came from three, good for 261st in the country. On those shots, Northwestern made just 31.2%%, good for 279th in the country. In 2002 (the earliest season KenPom fully charts), shooting 34% of your shots from three put you just inside the top 100 nationally in three-pointers attempted per game. The game was beginning to drift further from the hoop.
Bill Carmody’s Northwestern team that year shot 43.6% of its shots from three, the 11th highest rate in the nation. Shooting 43.6% of your shots from three in 2020 would only put you just inside the top 50. Again, light years ahead of his time.
Chris Collins does not have what it takes to coach a modern offense. It is ironically his greatest strength as a coach that highlights his hesitancy towards such a system. Northwestern continues to recruit player after player who is between 6-4 and 6-10, can’t initiate offense, struggles to shoot but can finish through contact, and plays hard defense.
This year, Chase Audige, Anthony Gaines, and Pete Nance will headline that group. Depending on how you view Robbie Beran’s split between good teams (32% 3FG against Tier A KenPom teams) and not good teams (48% against everyone else), he may be included in that group. Some of the freshmen probably will as well. It’s not like Collins is a fast-paced aesthete either; no Collins team has ever been in the top 230 in KenPom adjusted tempo, so the sclerotic offense will be back in full force.
Anecdotally, what you see on the court scans with the numbers. Miller Kopp is a pure sharpshooter. Everyone else on the team is not comfortable when they are asked to put the ball in the basket from far away. Boo Buie was the only other player who you felt like wasn’t afraid to shoot from three.
Boo Buie went 31/110 from three. That’s 28.2% and that, reader, is Bad.
Chris Collins did his Classic Bit of running out (probably) an intriguing player (Jared Jones) to free up a scholarship. I hate that move a lot, not only because I think it is skeevy but because I think Jared Jones is one of the few pieces who look like a modern basketball player, albeit the rim-running interior defender type that is also maybe dying out. Instead, Jones now joins the very long list of Northwestern transfers, which notably included a stretch-5 who could space the defense and create open driving lanes for his teammates. Rapolas Ivanauskas, you deserved more.
What is left is yet another roster that is doomed to be one of the two worst teams in the conference (assuming we even get something resembling a season). Unless Ty Berry or Chase Audige are actually killers who can take the team on their backs, Northwestern will be very bad yet again. They will not be able to score enough points for their above-average defense to be anything other than a speed bump for their opponents.
And when the smoke clears on another slog of a season, the questions will start to flow: who should be the next head coach for Northwestern basketball?
I don’t have the answer. But I do know what the next kind of Northwestern basketball team should look like. And it’s that 1998 Princeton team that hunted the right shots on one end and forced turnovers on the other end. They can do that quickly. They can do that slowly. All that matters, though, is that basketball in 2020 requires that they do that. Heck, did they watch what the women’s team did last year? More threes, more turnovers...voila, a top-12 team in the country.
Chris Collins either doesn’t recognize that inarguable fact or is unable to recruit, develop, and coach a team that can accomplish it.
He should break out his VCR. I have some game tape for him.
