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Princeton University Athletics
A Team For All Time
December 13, 2007 | Men's Basketball
It was a familiar look during his four seasons as the head coach of men's basketball at Princeton. It was the look he gave when informed that Hamilton, soon to be his Division III return-from-exam opponent one season, had finally lost a game, spoiling a perfect season and taking some of the edge off his comments that the Continentals were going to be hard to beat when they got to Jadwin.
“They lost at Oneonta,” he said that day. “You're not going to win there.”
This particular look from Carmody is staring up at you now from a weathered 1997-98 Princeton media guide. It's the picture from the back cover, where Carmody, then the second-year head coach of the Tigers after a 15-year hitch as Pete Carril's top assistant with the program, stands staring at the schedule, in a look that echoes his predecessor's legendary line, repeated annually: “I'm trying to figure out which game we're going to win.”
Not that he ever believed it, just like he never believed that Hamilton was going to be too tough. Bill Carmody is a shrewd guy, and he knew the hand he was holding that year.
The 1997-98 Princeton men's basketball team put together a legendary season, by any account. The Tigers had the best record in Division I basketball that season, going 27-2 with only a loss to top-ranked North Carolina in Chapel Hill in mid-December and a loss to Michigan State in the second round of the NCAA tournament 21 games later. Princeton would go 14-0 in the Ivy League; the average score would be 72.3-51.4. The Tigers would end the regular season ranked eighth in the Associated Press poll and would earn a fifth seed in the NCAA tournament. Princeton would play seven games at Jadwin Gym that season that drew at least 6,000 fans.
Princeton would set school records that year for wins (27), fewest losses (2), winning streak (20), three-pointers made in a season (265), assists in a season (478) and winning percentage (.931) that still stand.
“I think that team changed the mindset about mid-major teams by showing just how good it was,” says Alexander Wolff, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated who wrote about that team (and a member of the Princeton Class of 1979). “That team demonstrated for everyone how good a team from that level could be. It changed everybody's thinking. Maybe the era of parity in college basketball started with Chaminade's win over Virginia (in 1983). George Mason, everything that came after it, that Princeton team was a big chapter in it.”
This was more than just a good basketball team, however. By season's end, it was impossible to calculate how many column inches had been written about this team, how many television interviews had been conducted. The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter, Robyn Norwood, across the country to attend practice. The Miami Herald came. The San Antonio Express-Times did as well. So did Sports Illustrated. Same with the Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News and the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun and so on. And on and on it went.
It was hardly confined to the sports section, either. The New York Times Magazine ran a four-page spread on the Tigers. ABC News came. George Will wrote a piece for Newsweek.
“They were a non-scholarship team beating scholarship teams,” Wolff says. “And it was the way they played. Carmody said it was an oak tree-willow tree thing. If your guy did X, then you did Y. It was that simple.”
And it spread like wildfire.
“In some ways, Princeton has been a victim of that team,” Wolff says. “If you look for historical context for that team, it's the spread of the offense. Grant Wahl doesn't do a big piece in Sports Illustrated about the offense if it's not for that season. The irony is that the success of that team planted the seeds in so many others, and it's taken some of the secrets off of the offense. That's something that may have dogged Princeton itself a bit.”
Now the phone rings in Los Angeles, and the voice that answers is exactly the same as it was 10 years earlier, when it was answering questions from all of those reporters.
“Ten years?” asks Steve Goodrich, the 1998 Ivy League Player of the Year, who went from starting every game of his Princeton career to playing in Europe and then for the Bulls and Nets in the NBA. “That's crazy. What I remember most is how exceptional it was to be part of a team where everyone liked each other so much. I remember all the time we spent together.”
And?
“And that we should have beaten Michigan State.”
That Michigan State team, of course, started four players who would also start two years later when the Spartans won the NCAA title, and three of those players would go on to play in the NBA. Two of them, Charlie Bell of the Milwaukee Bucks and Morris Peterson of the Toronto Raptors, still play in the NBA.
“When I think back to that team, the record of course stands out,” says Wolff. “They lost two games, and those two games could have gone either way.”
It's been 10 years since that team wore the Orange and Black. It seems like those 10 years have gone by in a blink of an eye.
“When I look back on my basketball experience,” says Goodrich, who after his professional career ended got his MBA at UCLA and now works for a start-up commercial bank, “the best part was playing at Princeton.”
The 1997-98 team did not happen in a vacuum; instead, it came as part of an amazing stretch of Ivy League basketball history.
Going back 30 years earlier, Columbia won a playoff against Princeton to earn the league's NCAA tournament berth in 1968. From that point until 1986, either Princeton or Penn represented the league in every NCAA tournament. In 1986, though, Brown finally broke through, and after Penn returned in 1987, Cornell took the league title in 1988. Those three years, from 86-88, the three Ivy champs combined to lose their first round games by a total of 120 points.
Just when it looked like the end for Ivy basketball, with talk of taking that automatic bid away from leagues like the Ivy, an unbelievable turnaround happened. Princeton emerged from a crowded race to win the 1989 title at 11-3, earning a No. 16 seed in the process. Then, shockingly, Princeton played the No. 1 team in the country, Georgetown, to a one-point loss, falling 50-49 as to this day many will swear that Bob Scrabis and Kit Mueller were fouled by Alonzo Mourning in the final six seconds.
That year started a run of four straight league titles by Princeton, which included four first-round losses by a total of 15 points. Penn then took over in 1993 and played in the next three tournaments, winning one first round game against Nebraska in 1994 and losing in close fashion the other two years. Both Princeton and Penn had tasted the Top 25 during their runs, but neither one of those runs seemed to overlap.
By the middle of the decade, though, Princeton had reloaded, with a young team ready to compete with Penn in 1996. The teams would go to a playoff to determine the NCAA tournament bid, and Princeton would take it in overtime and then go on to have Carril announce his retirement and then knock off UCLA in the opening round on then-freshman Gabe Lewullis' layup in the final seconds.
“When people talk to me about my playing career, they always mention the shot against UCLA,” says Lewullis, now a third-year resident in orthopedic surgery. “To me, that game was just a lot of things going our way. When I think about my career, I think about the playoff win over Penn my freshman year and the team my junior year. My junior year, to beat us, things had to go really well for the other team. That wasn't just the case of getting some breaks.”
The 1996-97 season was Bill Carmody's first as head coach, and his team would go 14-0 in the league and 24-4 overall. Sydney Johnson, the 1997 Ivy League Player of the Year (and now the Princeton head coach), graduated after the season, but the cupboard was hardly bare for the following year.
“We had lost some really good players from the year before,” Goodrich says. “We lost Sydney, who was the leader. We lost Jesse Rosenfeld. We knew we had some good players back, but I don't think we walked in thinking we were going to beat everyone.”
The coaching staff consisted of Carmody, the head coach, and assistants Joe Scott and John Thompson, who would both go on to become head coaches and take their own programs to the NCAA tournament. Howard Levy was the volunteer assistant.
Even without Johnson, Princeton did return seniors Goodrich, who had started every game of his career, and Mitch Henderson, who had basically been a starter his entire career. Fellow senior James Mastaglio had come off the bench as a junior, but he too had been a starter and big contributor since his freshman year. Juniors Brian Earl and Gabe Lewullis were also established starters long before the 1997-98 season.
Mason Rocca, who was hurt much of the year, Nate Walton and C.J. Chapman were the first three off the bench, when the bench was used.
The starting five would start all 29 games together, play 88% of the minutes and score 91% of the points. They were an amazingly balanced, ridiculously cohesive group, and it showed all over the court.
“We were playing with our buddies,” says Lewullis, a first-team All-Ivy League selection that season and the No. 3 all-time leader in three-pointers in school history. “We trusted each other so completely off the court, and that carried over onto the court. We had played together for so long. These things are unique to college basketball. That's a big part of why we were so good and so consistent.”
Princeton would have an assist on 71% of its baskets. In a game against Niagara at the Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden, Princeton would have 21 assists on 21 baskets. It was during that game that Carmody uttered his infamous line during a timeout, when he was asked by his players what to do against the Purple Eagles' changing defenses. “You're smart guys,” he told them. “You figure it out.”
“We had the benefit of playing for Coach Carril and then for Coach Carmody,” Goodrich says. “We had been taught what the value of hard work was, what it took to be committed to winning. And then, when we were a veteran team, we were allowed to do things that played to our strengths. We pressed a lot. We pushed the ball at times. We made some mistakes, but knew it would be okay.”
Carmody may have been a little more tolerant of a quick shot or bad pass than Carril, but it didn't mean the standards and expectations were any lower.
“You had to be mentally tough,” says Lewullis. “What I learned from Coach Carril and Coach Carmody and Princeton basketball in general is that you can translate that into life, in anything you do. Being a reisident can be stressful. Playing for those guys really taught me deal with a lot of life situations.”
Carmody did have some of his predecessor's ability for the quip. When asked, for instance, to comment on the way Villanova's women's team allowed Nykesha Sales of UConn to score a basket on an uncontested layup and break her school's career scoring record one game after tearing her ACL, Carmody replied, without flinching, “Al Kaline had 399 career home runs; what's the big deal?”
“There couldn't have been a better successor,” Wolff says. “When he said 'you're smart guys; you'll figure it out,' to me, that's one of the great coaching moments ever. Carmody was smart enough to figure out the advantage of having smart guys and empowering them.”
A late summer trip to Italy gave Princeton a valuable head start, and the season began on Nov. 11 - which was early back then - with the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at the Meadowlands. Princeton's first game would be against Texas, and it would be a definite precursor of what was to come. Mastaglio, Earl and Henderson played all 40 minutes, while Goodrich went 38 and Lewullis went 36. Four players were in double figures, and Princeton won 62-56. The next night saw the Tigers knock off North Carolina State 38-36 as Earl scored the game-winner on a goaltending call, giving Princeton the tournament title.
The Tigers would stretch their record to 7-0, knocking off Rutgers, Monmouth, UNC-Wilmington, Lafayette and then Bucknell. During that run, Princeton would actually trail at the half in four of the seven games.
Next up was a game at North Carolina, who was ranked second nationally that week but poised to take over the top spot after Michigan knocked off No. 1 Duke earlier that day. The score was even at 21-21 at halftime, and Princeton would have the lead in the final eight minutes before falling 50-42. That Carolina team featured current NBA players Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison and Brendan Haywood.
The next game was the Jimmy V. Classic at the Meadowlands, where Princeton knocked off Wake Forest 69-64, and then the ECAC Holiday Festival at the Garden, where the Tigers struggled to a 58-56 win over Drexel when the Dragons missed a three-pointer at the buzzer and then coasted past Niagara to win the title.
The new year began at Jadwin, where more than 6,000 jammed in to see the 10-1 Tigers take on Manhattan. Finally, after some tight games against good teams, Princeton exploded. Goodrich won the tap to Lewullis, who fed ahead to Mastaglio for a dunk just five seconds into the game. Princeton would lead 15-0 before the Jaspers scored and then by as many as 34 in the second half.
The Ivy League turned out to have one blowout after another. Princeton built a 16-point lead at Yale before winning by 11 in the first game then wiped out Brown by 30 the next night in Providence.
After exam break and an entertaining 59-50 win over Division III College of New Jersey, Princeton went back to work in the league. The next 11 games would all be won by at least 10 points, with seven of those 11 by at least 20. The last game of the regular season was at Penn, after Princeton had clinched the title, and the Tigers were pushed to overtime before knocking off the Quakers 78-72, backed by 33 from Goodrich.
“It was a great time,” Goodrich says. “People would come into Jadwin Gym and shake the bleachers. We used to have to go on the road to get a big-time arena feeling, but we had that at Jadwin that year.”
The first round of the NCAA tournament matched Princeton against UNLV, and it turned out to be a national showcase for the Tiger season. Princeton went on a 20-2 run to end the first half to erase a five-point deficit and then, when UNLV cut it to five in the second half, went on another 15-4 run to blow it open. The final was 69-57.
And then, it ended. Heartbreakingly.
Michigan State scored the first 10 points of the game, but it was 33-31 at halftime. The Tigers would never lead, but they would use an 8-1 run to tie at 54-54 with two minutes to play when Mastaglio was ruled to have his foot on the three-point line on a jump shot.
Peterson hit a pair of foul shots to break the tie, and then, after a Princeton miss, Mateen Cleaves hit a killer three-point shot from deep with 34 seconds left. It would end 63-56.
“What I remember most about that year is the losses,” says Lewullis. “That game against Michigan State was a 4-5 game, so it was supposed to be a toss-up. I think if we played them 10 times, it would have been a toss-up. I read a story before the game where their coach said the way to stop us was to hold us on our screens, to bump us every chance they got. They tried to be really physical with us. Maybe we didn't have their physical prowess, but we had players just as good as their's.”
Fittingly, Earl and Henderson would play all 40 minutes, while Lewullis, Mastaglio and Goodrich went 39 each.
“We had great consistency,” Goodrich says. “We beat a lot of good programs that year. We played a tough level of competition, and we won almost all of them. We'd had a lot of years where we lost some during the year that maybe we shouldn't have, but we really didn't have that bad loss that year. It got us credibility as a good team, not just as a team that runs a gimmicky system. Do I marvel at what we accomplished? I would marvel at it more if we'd beaten Michigan State.”
The fact that the Michigan State loss still bothers those who were there is proof to SI's Wolff about the truest character of the team.
“The fact that it still sticks in their craw speaks to the very reason they were so good,” he says. “They didn't have this lower standard. They weren't going to settle for 'we did well for an Ivy school.' They believed that they could beat anyone, and they very nearly did.”
Since then, the group has stayed very close, as they have spread throughout the country and internationally, where Rocca still plays professionally. Lewullis has almost three more years as a resident before he becomes an orthopedic surgeon. Earl and Henderson are assistant coaches. Mastaglio and Goodrich are in the business world.
“We've all gone everywhere, to weddings, reunions, everything,” Goodrich says. “When my father died, everyone from the team was at the funeral. We played basketball together that day. That's what I take away from that year. The memory of spending so much time together and to have a group of guys who liked each other so much, that's what resonates for me.”
Princeton trailed Bucknell 30-25 at halftime on Dec. 9, 1997. It was a Tuesday night in Lewisburg, at the old Davis Gym, where the worst of the 2,000 or so seats still appeared to be within arm's reach of the court. A year earlier, Bucknell had shocked Princeton at Jadwin Gym, rallying from 19 points back to win by 12 in overtime.
This time, the Bison were on their home court, which was packed, and hostile. The lead grew to seven to start the second half, and it was starting to look more and more like Bucknell's night.
That was an illusion.
The resulting 35-8 run that the Tigers went on was pure poetry, and it blew the Bison right out of the gym. After a 37.5% first half from the field, Princeton shot 68.4% in the second half. All five Tiger starters finished in double figures.
In the locker room afterwards, Carmody began to address his team.
“There are 40 year olds out there,” he said, “who would give everything to trade places with you. Who would love to be able to play basketball. Who would love to have your opportunity. Cherish it. Don't waste it. When you're 40, you don't want to look back and think that you wasted one game of it.”
Their coach need not have worried that night in Lewisburg 10 years ago: His team cherished its opportunity.
The 1997-98 Tigers didn't waste their chance. Watching that team was like going to the ballet. It was a rare mix of artistry and athleticism, of five moving as one, of sport so precise that it must have been choreographed.
- By Jerry Price