Gary will be returning with a new blog on May 2. This week, he’s asked RCN’s John Leone to guest blog. RCN-TV viewers should recognize John from the Lafayette College basketball broadcasts on the Lafayette Sports Network.
When a college has been around for nearly two centuries as Lafayette has, it stands to reason that it not only bears witness to significant historic milestones, but that it also has a hand in producing them. Francis March, for example, occupied the chair of English language and comparative philology at Lafayette College from 1857 to 1907. It was the first post of its kind. March was one of the first professors to advocate and teach English in colleges and universities. Over the years, Lafayette graduates have pioneered the use of laparoscopic surgery, orchestrated cyber-security breakthroughs, and built new companies from scratch. And of course, we loyal Leopards love to trumpet the fact that the use of “The Football Helmet” and “The Huddle” originated on College Hill.
Indeed, innovation – academic and otherwise – has been a staple of the place seemingly forever. But as the calendar turns and we close the book on a dynamic college basketball season, I’m reminded of yet another. It was the spring of 1951 when Lafayette’s former coach, player, and then-Athletic Director, Bill Anderson ’19, reached out to Butch Van Breda Kolff and brought him in as “The Coach.” He was immediately introduced to his senior point guard-in-waiting, Pete Carril, who’d someday carve his own niche among the game’s greatest coaches. That introduction was not only the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship, it spawned a style of play that would impact the game for decades to come.
VBK and Pete saw the game through a different lens as early as the late 40’s. And while the evolution of the game cannot be denied, its basic tenets remain. The pick and roll and the give and go (well, maybe not the give and go so much these days – unless it happens by accident) are still pervasive in today’s game. There is also no denying the fact that the best coaches still manipulate talent to fit into an offensive system. They plug their respective pieces into places on the court where they can be most productive – and, sadly in many more cases, where they can do the least damage. It’s called “good coaching,” and to be sure, it has its place. But too often, that process can devolve into basketball’s version of a Rube Goldberg machine – parts and pieces plugged into spaces with rigid, pre-determined roles and little opportunity for the participants to see and think and do things creatively – and in concert with the four other guys.
I’m struck by the similarities in so many of the offenses that I see these days. What made Butch’s offense so difficult to defend was the fact that it was virtually impossible to prepare for in any conventional way. After all, how could the defense predict what an offense would do if the guys running it didn’t know themselves – that is, until they saw it develop spontaneously? Even Coach Carril’s use of Butch’s basic movement and its principles took on much more structure as he developed his great Princeton teams. Still, the fundamental premise was for players to see, think, and do – in precisely that order. After all, “the smart do take from the strong”, as Coach Carril points out in his book.
Butch would be the last to use flowery metaphors to explain his offensive philosophy. But watching him implement and grow it virtually every day for the four years we spent together gave me a special window into his genius. He called it “organized confusion”. It was jazz, not classical. And he was the ultimate maestro. Yes, it has its principles and parameters – primarily floor balance and spacing – but what makes it great is its capacity for improvisation, not necessarily off the dribble, but as much without the ball as with it. Every move is predicated on “seeing” the guy in front of you, reading the defense, and playing “smart”. Each possession becomes a kind of snowflake – virtually never the same as anything that came before it. Put guys in the right spots on the floor, give them a template for intelligent movement, and a coach can create spontaneity. An oxymoron? For sure, but not surprising, since Butch’s life was a paradox. This, after all, was the fun stuff. Butch and Pete would simply call it “playing the game right.”
On the eve of his national championship in 1987, Bob Knight was asked by a reporter which coaches had the greatest influence on him. After invoking the names of guys like Hank Iba and Pete Newell, he told the Times-Picayune in New Orleans that “Butch Van Breda Kolff’s offense at Princeton (1962-66) always mesmerized me.”
In the four years that I worked with Butch at Lafayette, a different position player led us in scoring each year: a center, a forward, a point guard, and an off-guard. Butch refused to put numbers on players. It was no accident, but rather the product of playing the game in a way that allowed the ball to find the right guy at the right time. It would always take a little more time. But around mid-January to early February, the music and the voices would begin to harmonize.
There are plenty of folks who watch the game, whether sitting in packed arenas or flipping channel to channel to witness the thrills and upsets of March Madness. There are far fewer who see the game. Still fewer have the unique ability to translate and convey what they see into the kind of choreography that allows five bodies to move to the rhythm of a single brain. It’s a different way to coach and teach the game, but the rewards are – at least in my view – infinitely greater.
This point was driven home to me again just last December when I had lunch with Coach Pete. Whenever we meet, we invariably talk basketball – even if not in the same language that most others might understand. I’m not nearly as wise as The Coach, but I always sense that I can “see” what he’s thinking. Pete’s record at Princeton is now the stuff of college basketball legend. But I was struck when the “Old Professor,” an icon in his own right, glanced away wistfully and suggested, “Nobody saw the game like Butch.” High praise from the guy who gave us the Princeton Offense. But Pete still calls him “Coach,” and that’s good enough for me.
