Letters to the editor

We all learn from Tigers' failures

Regarding 'Tigers go out with a whimper' (Wednesday, March 9, 2005):

Like many fans of PU basketball, I looked forward to the Joe Scott era and still do. Still, let's not ignore what just happened. The obvious seems to have escaped Coach Scott and the 'Prince' sportswriters when they, respectively, fail to look in the mirror and throw their hands up mystified by the demoralizing play. Three things changed from last year — Ed Persia graduated, Harrison Schaen left for a year and Joe Scott arrived. Only one of those changes could have affected a team still loaded with so much talent so fundamentally.

What we witnessed, I think, was bravado and bad judgment. Maybe the bravado was simply overeagerness on the coach's part. But it made all the sense in the world to ride your seniors and their existing style of play — with tweaks perhaps — to one last NCAA bid before revamping for the Scott era. The seniors were entitled to that — and common sense would have said that having graduating players learn a new system was not a particularly wise investment. Instead, it was apparent that three years of work by this year's crop of seniors under a prior system would be undone all at once. The results might have been expected: too often our players looked like they were deer frozen in headlights.

Don't get me wrong. I wanted Joe Scott and I'm glad we have him. I look forward to many seasons of winning basketball. But this season was his mistake. The classy seniors kick themselves for the implosion. Hold your heads up. You did us proud. We all learn — players, sportswriters and fans included. The coach too. Mickey Faigen '73

Thank seniors for 2004, blame Scott for 2005

Regarding 'Tigers go out with a whimper' (Wednesday, March 9, 2005):

At first glance, it seemed like the easy choice. Bring back Joe Scott '87, onetime assistant to Pete Carril, to his alma mater to extend that legendary coaching tradition of Princeton basketball excellence. He was coming off of a Top-25 season with an Air Force team that had been among the worst in the nation for years, finishing with a tournament loss to North Carolina in the same building where the departing John Thompson III's Tigers had just challenged Texas. He employed a variant of the same offensive system already used here and singlehandedly devised a team defense that allowed his players to play beyond their limited size and athleticism. But it is those same offensive and defensive systems that should have warned Gary Walters to look beyond the easy choice. Now, as the team just finished its first losing season in Ivy League history, one year after going 13-1 with most of the same players, these faults have become clear for all to see.

First, Scott's offensive system is more of a "pure" Princeton system than that which was employed by Coach Thompson. In the aftermath of the 1996 UCLA upset and the heights of the Top 10 1997-98 season, Princeton began to attract a much wider pool of athletes. As highly talented individuals like Andre Logan, Will Venable and Judson Wallace joined the team, Thompson adjusted the offense to play to those players' strengths. Scott's system, however, minimizes the contribution of any one player, meaning that the "un-Princeton-like" athleticism of these players became wasted. While this makes sense for a small, outside-shooting team like Air Force, it was certainly not the way to get the most out of the 2005 Tigers, and it showed.

On defense, a similar mechanism was at work. Scott's matchup zone forces players to constantly switch the players they defend. This means that it is impossible for Princeton's best defender, Will Venable, to continually guard the other team's best offensive player, leading to breakdowns like those against Yale, when Bulldog star Edwin Draughan was able to dominate the Princeton defense over and over again.

Despite these obvious faults on both offense and defense, Coach Scott never once modified his game plan. Unlike Coach Thompson, he apparently does not see flexibility as a virtue and appears to let out his frustration at losing on the officials and his players instead of looking at his own coaching philosophies.

So what does this mean for Princeton basketball in general? For one, it means that the Class of 2005, both the players and the fans, were deprived of a chance to build on the success of 2004. As a student whose first game in the stands at Jadwin was a raucous experience against Kansas, it was nothing worse than a tragedy to end our final year with a whimper against archrival Penn. I also tremble for the future of our program, as Princeton will likely see the return of "small" basketball, a style the rest of the Ivy League appears to be mastering, less than five years after the tremendous recruiting brought on by our late 90's success.

Perhaps this will serve as a lesson, and next time there will be a more deliberate process before hiring a new coach. Brad Klein '05