Men's Basketball: Glory days, tough times

Correction appended

This is the second of a two-part series about the history of Princeton basketball.

The year was 1996. Pete Carril was in his 29th and final season as Princeton head coach. The coach had had no shortage of glorious moments — 12 Ivy League championships, one National Invitational Tournament championship, 10 NCAA Tournament berths — but he had to make one last stand.

A 12-2 Ivy League season and a crucial overtime win over Penn gave the Tigers an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament as the No. 13 seed in the Southeast region, with a chance to face Goliath. Jim Harrick’s UCLA team appeared unbeatable, having won the national championship the year before and entering the tournament as Pac-10 champion again. But that brisk night in March belonged to Cinderella, as Princeton sent the Bruins to a stunning 43-41 exit in the coach’s last hoorah.

Seven years earlier, an even more momentous game took place. Princeton, the 1989 Ivy League champion, entered the tournament as a No. 16 seed, drawing the East region top seed Georgetown in the first round. For the previous four years, the Ivy champ had donned its shoes in March for the Big Dance only to be waltzed out the door in disgraceful fashion by an average margin of defeat of 35 points. That year, NCAA officials had been deliberating permanently removing the Ivy League’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament under the assumption that the Ivy League simply couldn’t compete. In front of 12,106 fans and against all odds, the Tigers played the Hoyas to a virtual standstill, losing 50-49 in the final seconds of the game on an arguable no-call on Kit Mueller ’91’s shot.

Needless to say, the NCAA did not eradicate the Ivy League’s automatic bid to the tournament. Perhaps it is best that Georgetown won in that contest, as Dick Vitale would have been forced to honor his promise to serve as ball boy for Princeton’s subsequent game.

Before Carril ever set foot on campus, Princeton had enjoyed the services of another basketball great.

A two-time high school All-American, William Bradley ’65 scored more than 3,000 points at Crystal City High School and had received scholarship offers from some 75 schools as his senior year wound down. Unlike other upper-tier basketball schools, Princeton could not offer Bradley an athletic scholarship. The institution’s academic credentials, however, aligned with Bradley’s interests, so head coach Butch van Breda Kolff managed to land one of the nation’s hottest recruits.

On campus, Bradley wasted little time making his name known throughout the country. He led the team to three consecutive Ivy League titles in his three years as a varsity player, averaging an unprecedented 30.2 points per game in the process.

In 1965, Bradley led Princeton to its first and only Final Four appearance. Princeton finished the year ranked No. 3 in the nation after routing Wichita State 118-82 in the consolation game, in which Bradley scored 58 points.

Bradley finished his career at Princeton as a three-time All-American. In his senior year, he was honored as the National Player of the Year. He was also the first basketball player to receive the James E. Sullivan Award, given to the nation’s top amateur athlete.

Bradley’s tenure at Princeton laid the foundation for the school’s ride to basketball prominence. A host of talent from all over the nation followed Bradley’s footsteps onto the Princeton hardwood, where Carril molded them from raw potential into greatness. Geoff Petrie ’70, Armond Hill ’85, Brian Taylor ’84, Kit Mueller ’91 — Princeton had made a name for itself, and the recruiting trail suddenly heated up with talk of the Tigers.

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“When Bradley came here, [he] started to attract some good players. We had a tough schedule; we were on TV a lot, which was attractive, as was Princeton’s style of play,” Carril said. “What van Breda Kolff did was to nationalize the sport. He and Bradley took the program to the point where if you go across the country, Princeton basketball is prominent in the mind of anybody who follows basketball.”

The golden years lasted from the van Breda Kolff/Bradley era to the early 21st century. Judson Wallace ’05 lived through the last glory days of the program. Stepping onto campus in fall 2001, Wallace said he had the highest hopes for his future as well as for the future of the basketball program.

“When I committed to Princeton, I went there because I wanted to go to the NCAA tournament and because I had no doubt in my mind that Princeton was going to win games,” Wallace said. “When I was there, we would go to the gym, and the other team would know that we were going to win. You just knew from the looks on their faces. Everybody expected Princeton to win, and teams would be afraid when they had to play us. When you have that kind of attitude, it’s a totally different game.”

Princeton won two Ivy League titles during Wallace’s four years. The Tigers qualified for the NIT his freshman year and the NCAA tournament in his junior year, the last great season of Princeton basketball. Coach John Thompson III ’88 left Princeton after the 2004 season to take the head coaching job at Georgetown. In the four years since, Thompson and the Princeton Offense have propelled the Hoyas to 100 wins, one NIT appearance, three NCAA tournament qualifications and one trip to the Final Four.

But perhaps history has worked out OK. Princeton has gotten its wins, its fans, its stars and certainly its fair share of moments in history.

The last four years, however, have witnessed a decline in the program unlike any the nation has witnessed. Since the Tigers’ last Ivy title and NCAA Tournament berth in 2004, the team has won progressively fewer games each season. Twenty wins in ’04 dropped to 17 in ’05, then 12, then 11, then finally six in ’08 in Princeton’s first single-digit-win season since 1953. A 13-1 record in the Ivies in 2004 somehow translated into a 6-8 performance the following year. The infamous 2005 season marked the first time in the history of Princeton basketball that the team had finished with a losing record in Ivy League play.

The question is: What happened?

The recent rough patch

After Thompson left Princeton, Joe Scott ’87 took over as head coach. Fourth on Princeton’s all-time steals list and recipient of the 1987 B.F. Bunn Trophy, Scott had served as an assistant coach under Carril and Bill Carmody from 1992 to 2000 and was no stranger to the system.

Scott received his first head coaching job at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2000. Three years of building and recruiting resulted in the Falcons’ 22-7 record in the 2004 season, which earned an NCAA Tournament berth. Along with the award for Mountain West Conference Coach of the Year, Scott also received the offer to head up the team at his alma mater. Things could not have looked brighter.

Then the storm hit.

His first season with the team produced a 17-13 record and a sixth-place finish in the Ivy League. His second season: 12-15. His third: 11-17.

“I was really close to Coach Thompson, and obviously my senior year was probably the beginning of the downfall of Princeton basketball,” Wallace said. “My senior year, we had all five starters back, and six of our first seven returning. And obviously we didn’t have a good season. I hurt my back half-way through the season, I wasn’t very good, and we just didn’t really click as a team.”

Princeton finished last in the Ivies for the first time in its history in 2007. The 2-12 league record, the 21 points scored in a loss against Monmouth — the fewest points scored in a game after the three- point line was added — as well as a loss to Division III opponent Carnegie Mellon marked the nadir of Princeton basketball and brought about the end of the Joe Scott era.

“Joe couldn’t maintain Princeton basketball at the level it was at,” Carril said. “Your heart gets broken here a lot. You’re out on the road, and you see a great player, but you know he won’t get into the school, or he can’t handle it financially. It’s not easy to coach here. Some sports are easier to coach than others, but I’d say that coaching basketball at Princeton with the schedule we have is difficult. One year we played UCLA on a Saturday in Madison Square Garden. Then, because we lost, we played North Carolina. Then we played Davidson. We faced the three best teams in the nation back to back to back, and we lost all three.”

Scott’s resignation left the door open for Sydney Johnson ’97 to step in for the 2007-08 season and revitalize the ailing program. The six wins in his first year at the helm, though, left the future looking grim. Nevertheless, Johnson maintains an optimistic attitude about the program.

“I would say that there has been no downfall of Princeton basketball,” Johnson said. “Coach Carril has told me many times about years where his team didn’t do very well. I think every great program goes through some point where they’re not as great as they have been, and that’s exactly where we are. I know we’re struggling right now, but ‘downfall’ is too strong a word.”

A difficult road ahead

Princeton basketball has found it difficult to escape its current slump.

The game of basketball, as well as the national recruiting and competition scene, has drastically changed since Princeton basketball’s heyday. On top of that, Princeton has lost some of the magic that surrounded its name in decades past.

“Princeton used to be the darling of the country in some sense,” Johnson said. “Now you have a Davidson, a George Mason, a Gonzaga: Men’s basketball has a large appeal across the country.”

The financial pressures and heavy academic load that accompany attending Princeton have increased dramatically over the past half-century. Regardless of the academic credentials of the University, a bill close to $50,000 a year and no athletic scholarship does little to attract the nation’s best talent.

“Basketball for the most part has been dominated by the lower socioeconomic classes,” Carril said. “Which is not stated in a pejorative way; people often use this in a humorous sense. They say that if you’re looking at a player with a three-car garage, then you can forget it. It’s kind of funny, but there’s some truth to it.”

“Where you get your best players is the city,” Carril said. “But the city is also where you have the hardest time finding players who are good, but who have the necessary academic qualifications. So as the standards are going up and as the game becomes more and more of a city game, it becomes harder to find good players who can do the school work at Princeton. And if any of them are really good students, they head off to the scholarship schools like Stanford, Duke, UNC and places like that.”

Schools thrived that provided scholarships. Princeton slowly receded from the height of the national basketball scene. The lack of wins, reduced media exposure, hefty fees and heavy academic load have combined to avert young recruits’ eyes from the small liberal arts school in New Jersey.

“I know that there is an obvious effort on the part of our league competitors to be good at men’s basketball,” Johnson said. “The coaches that have been hired, the recruiting practices, upgrade in facilities in certain spots are all indicative of this trend. Additionally, the rest of the entire country has prioritized being good at men’s basketball. It has made it more challenging to lure top-notch students and top-notch basketball players to Princeton when they have that many options across the nation and across the league.”

The rebirth

One of the principles of Keynesian economics is that a nation should spend itself out of a recession. If the same principle applied to college basketball, then a $16 billion endowment would have the Tiger nation pretty stoked about the future. Unfortunately, change doesn’t come that easily.

Princeton is off to a 4-8 start this season, with three of those losses by five points or less. With the Ivy League season starting at the end of the month, the Tigers will have plenty of work to do if the program’s revival is soon to occur.

But the second-year coach in town has the players and the fans excited, and the spirit of change has reached from the campaign trail to Jadwin Gymnasium.

“We’ve won a lot of games in our history, and I just think that you can also go through a downswing,” Johnson said. “The one thing that is constant, though, is change. We may be losing games, but the one thing that I know that’s consistent is change, and change certainly for the better. I expect us, as do our staff, our players, to be competitive. We take things one day at a time.”

Across the nation, orange and black memorabilia have begun to creep out after four years of hibernation.

“I think you can already see this year we’re getting back into the old ways of Princeton basketball,” Wallace said. “Coach Johnson has that youthful attitude, he’s a fresh face, and he has a ton of energy. But on top of all that, he’s a winner. Even over here in Italy, I tell my coaches that the new Princeton basketball coach is Sydney Johnson, and they all know who he is. They know that he’s won championships as a player and as a coach and that he’s a winner.”

Change is around the corner, and nobody knows it better than the man that sat in the driver’s seat longer than anyone else in the program’s history.

“I just watched the team,” Carril said. “They’re losing some games that they could easily have won, but the breakthrough is around the corner. The system is designed to get them good open shots. They get those shots and they miss them. Wide open shots. It’s just a matter of time before those start falling.”

“After watching them play against Lehigh and against Lafayette, which I thought was even better, I think you have to look forward to the future,” Carril said. “There’s an element of rebirth there. Whether we can beat UCLA again, I don’t know.”

Princeton nation, remain patient. The good times will soon be here again.

Correction:The original version of this article misstated the number of seasons Carril served as head coach.