Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 at 12:45 pm | 3 responses

A scattering of thoughts on Princeton, Pete Carril and basketballs most deliberate system.

by Nick Rotunno

As basketball fans across America recovered from a wild, bracket-busting weekend of March Madness, the Princeton University mens team quietly wrapped up the 11-12 season on March 19, falling to the Pitt Panthers in the quarterfinals of the College Basketball Invitational (CBI). Almost no one noticed, because the CBI is an unceremonious little tournament for mostly average teams, and the national media had bigger things to write about.

The game was played in Pittsburgh on the Panthers home floor, and Princeton was wholly outmatched. By halftime Pitt had built a 24-point lead, and the Panthersout-shooting and out-rebounding the smaller Princeton squadcruised to an 82-61 victory. The Tigers hung around in the early going, but Pitts Big East bruisers were too much to handle.

According to the Princeton athletics website, the only good news for the Tigers concerned senior guard Douglas Davis, whose game-high 20 points moved him into second place on Princetons all-time scoring list (1,550 career points). An impressive achievement, to be sure, but Davis is still a long way from the incomparable Bill Bradley, the Tigers all-time scoring champion, who tallied a staggering 2,504 points in just three seasons of college ball, before the era of the three-point line. Bradleys total is all but unreachable, though Davis gave it a solid try.

Princeton finished a respectable 20-12 this season (11-4 in the Ivy League). It was an up-and-down year for head coach Mitch Henderson and the Tigers: Princeton kicked off the schedule with a head-scratching home loss to Wagner, nearly beat North Carolina State in Raleigh four days later, won a few, lost a few, then defeated Rutgers 59-57 on December 7. In the conference season, Princeton split with archrival Harvard, but the Crimson played well all winter, won the Ivy League and earned a berth in the NCAA Tournament (they didnt make it very far). The boys from New Jersey had to settle for the CBIPrinceton beat Evansville in the first round before getting hammered by Pitt.

All told, the Tigers 11-12 campaign was a moderate success.

So why spill so much ink on a mediocre team, after an unspectacular season? A fair question. To be honest, Ive never been to Princeton, NJ, and Ive never watched the Tigers play live. Princetons favorite son, the aforementioned Bill Bradleyone of the greatest college ballplayers of all time and a former US Senatorplayed his last game for the Black-and-Orange two decades before I was born. Aside from my natural love of the underdog, that very American tendency to root for the gutsy overachiever (and my idolization of John McPhee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and teacher of nonfiction writing at Princeton), I have no real connection to the program.

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