The velvet glove is The System, which is the code name for the Princeton offense. That is where Northwestern coach Bill Carmody learned it as an assistant to its venerable creator, Pete Carril, before he introduced it to the Big Ten Conference when he took over the Wildcats four seasons ago.
“It’s a funky system,” said Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, whose Spartans play host to Northwestern on Saturday.
It is also the system the New Jersey Nets used two seasons ago while reaching the NBA Finals, the system the Sacramento Kings have used this season while running up the NBA’s best record, the system North Carolina State used last Sunday in upsetting then-No. 1 Duke.
It is a system so renowned, in fact, Wildcats forward Vedran Vukusic heard of it while he was being recruited out of his hometown of Split, Croatia.
“I heard about it a lot,” he said. “They didn’t say it wasn’t for athletic guys. They said it was for guys who know how to do everything, a little bit of everything. That’s something I got used to back home. People [there] don’t lift as much, don’t work as much on their athleticism as much as their skill. I thought about that and thought that was the perfect program for me.”
Now he is a perfect piece of The System, that maze of passes, cuts and intricate steps that has propelled the Wildcats through their surprising season. They trail the league-leading Spartans by only 2 1/2 games in the Big Ten race, already have defeated Illinois, Wisconsin and Purdue and ride into East Lansing with a three-game winning streak.
The stone fist within that velvet glove is Jitim Young, the senior guard who called out the Wildcats six weeks ago. They had just been routed at Michigan in their Big Ten opener and he blasted his teammates.
“I was so disappointed in the way our team played. I felt Michigan really felt we were nothing,” he said. “I’m on the court, I’m 6-2, I’m pushing and rebounding with 6-11 guys and trying to be a guard, too, and I think guys were a little afraid. One thing I’ve never played on [is] a team that was afraid of anybody. I saw that and it made me sick to my stomach and I couldn’t take it. I just went off.
“The next day at practice, it was a different environment. From that day on, we became a better team.”
It changed the atmosphere.
“We haven’t always won,” Carmody said. “But we’re doing things harder and trying to win the games. They spanked us at Michigan. We were never in the game. It was embarrassing to them, especially Jitim. And he helped me, too, a lot. I was down in the dumps. He came in Thursday (the day after the loss), we usually go easy on Thursday, and said, `Coach, nobody’s tired. We have to get to work.’ That was it.”
They went back to work on The System, which confounded both Young and Vukusic when they first encountered it.
“How many plays do we have?” Vukusic asked his new teammates.
“Fifty,” he was told.
“Wow,” he thought.
“It seemed complex in the beginning,” he says now.
“My freshman year, we were all kind of like robots,” said Young, who landed at NU the same season as Carmody.
They were robots trying to master an offense that both challenged their basketball acumen and demanded they use every basketball skill. Fundamental play is a fading art in this modern age, which so prefers style over substance, but Carmody’s requirements demanded that every Wildcat know how to pass, to catch, to cut, to screen, to shoot and to recognize the scene unfolding around him.
“If you’re not skillful, you can’t play in this offense because everyone is the point guard,” Carril once said of his creation.
“It’s not the one man, the two man. I don’t think that,” Carmody said. “I think you get good players and big guys should be able to dribble the ball. Just because you’re 6-8 doesn’t mean you can’t take a long shot, doesn’t mean you can’t rebound and dribble down the court.
“What if Magic Johnson’s high school coach had said, `Hey, you’re 6-9, throw it to the 5-10 guard?’ Think of all the good stuff we would have missed watching.”
There are only a handful of plays in this offense, but as the Wildcats pass and cut and run their defenders through a maze, options abound for all of them at all points on the court. This is why the diminutive Young must be able to work inside, why the 6-8 Vukusic must be able to shoot the three, why opponents must be as vigilant as strangers at a pickpockets’ convention.
“They do things that are hard to guard,” Purdue coach Gene Keady said. “If you’re not focused, they get layups. You have to concentrate on defense. If you don’t, they just rip you apart.”
That has Izzo concerned.
“There are not a lot of teams that are disciplined enough defensively, so that is a big factor,” Izzo said. “Then what you do is get frustrated and you go on the offensive end and you become a little more tentative. You think, `Ooooh, if I take a bad shot or make a mistake, I have to go play defense for 30 more seconds.'”
The Wildcats are patient.
“We don’t say don’t shoot in the first 10 seconds, though lately we have been saying let’s see if we can probe a little bit longer,” Carmody said. “What happens then, each guy is tested. There are five guys playing defense and you might find a weakest link, a weaker link. It’s not just two-on-two basketball where you might hit their best defenders. If everyone’s moving and cutting and it’s a little more equal opportunity, then you test out some bad defenders also.”
Young’s tantrum drove the Wildcats to victories over Iowa and Illinois, but then they lost four of five and were matched at home against then-league-leading Wisconsin. There was little reason to believe they would beat the Badgers, but after trailing early, they regrouped, rallied and won while confounding them with both their offense and their equally “funky” matchup zone defense.
“That game propelled us to a different level,” Young said. “After that we went to Purdue, a physical team, and that game was definitely ugly. But the toughest team won. We proved to be a tough team that night.”
In more ways than one.
“If not physically, we’ve definitely gotten mentally tougher,” Vukusic said. “And that’s more important than physically tougher.”
The velvet glove, then, is the foundation of the Wildcats’ success, the reason why, in Big Ten play, they lead in the fundamental categories of turnover margin, assist-to-turnover ratio and three-point field goals made. But now that it comes with one more option, that fist of stone, it is more adaptable and more effective as well.
“I think about teams like the Dallas Mavericks,” Young said. “They’re a super offensive team, but when they meet a physical team like the Lakers, they have trouble. I kind of draw similarities between our team and the Mavericks. We have 6-9 guys who can step out and shoot the three. We’re a very open team and like to space the floor.
“But to win, you have to have more. You can’t be just one-dimensional. So now we’re stepping up to the plate and saying, `We don’t care what jersey you have on. You have to play us like we have to play you.'”
