NEW HAVEN, Conn. — These are not Ian Hummer’s father’s Princeton Tigers.
John Hummer, whose son is a sophomore forward on the Tigers team that meets Harvard today in a playoff game to determine the Ivy League’s representative in the NCAA Tournament, captained Princeton during the first of three legendary Pete Carril decades of backdoor cuts and kick-out 18-footers that won 13 Ivy titles and mesmerized powerhouses with twice the talent.
But three coaches later, Joe Scott’s 2006-07 Tigers were holding the ball for 33 seconds, jerking up off-balance 25 footers and going 2-12 in the league.
When Scott beat the posse out of town to Denver University, athletic director Gary Walters chose Sydney Johnson, a two-time captain from the last great era of Princeton basketball, when the Tigers stunned UCLA in the first round of the 1997 NCAA Tournament on the way to Top 25 rankings the next two seasons.
“We’ve been scouted for 30 years running some version of that offense,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to guard no matter how long you have been doing it, but the Coach Carril voice in me said, ‘Don’t just run plays, run stuff suited for your players.’
“We have guys who could do individual things within the team concept. Sometimes it’s with a ball screen, pick-and-roll, instead of waiting until the last five seconds to shoot. We still play together to get guys in the right spots.”
This year, in Johnson’s fourth season, the Tigers played almost as well as ever, claiming a share of the Ivy League championship with Harvard. The Crimson (23-5, 12-2), which won its first ever Ivy title, still has to play this afternoon at the neutral site of Yale’s home gym for its first NCAA Tournament berth since 1946 because 26-time champion Princeton (24-6, 12-2) won at Penn on Tuesday to force a playoff.
The win with the Tigers’ backs against the ancient Palestra walls especially revved Johnson, who played at a time when either Penn or Princeton was Ivy champion practically every season.
“The landscape has completely changed,” Johnson said. “Princeton is recruiting not just against Pennsylvania now, but against everybody now, and Ivy schools are winning some battles against scholarship schools. Some [Ivies] now have a little more [academic] leniency with bigger classes.”
The Tigers’ recruiting fell off some as Johnson went 6-23 with his first team. Johnson knows that because he now coaches against some kids he wanted. But Princeton being Princeton, and Johnson having been an excellent choice, the program has bounced back regardless.
Senior Dan Mavraides and junior Doug Davis provide considerable perimeter shooting and the bullish Hummer and senior Kareem Maddox bring interior scoring. Maddox, the Ivy defensive player of the year, is a caterpillar turned butterfly. Once a turnover waiting to happen, he personally willed the clutch, come-from-behind victory at Penn with 21 second-half points.
“We didn’t want to look back today, 10 years from now or whenever, and think we went out like a bunch of punks,” Maddox said.
Of course, an Ivy League punk is a higher class of punk. It’s not like the Tigers will be discussing the Great Books today with the Crimson, but trash talk will be at minimum as mutual respect is high.
When Johnson made his team sit on the bench seven days ago in Cambridge, Mass., and watch Harvard enjoy its 79-67 victory that earned it first dibs on the title, his message had nothing to do with a premature celebration and everything to do with his team still having another chance.
“It was brutal watching,” Maddox said. “We were all mad at ourselves for not having done enough, and we didn’t want to let this chance we still have slip away.”