Legend Pete Carril Rejoins Kings

78-year old hall of fame coach Pete Carril is returning to basketball as a consultant for the Sacramento Kings.

Carril is the legendary Princeton coach, who is the most winning coach of all-time in Ivy League history. After 30 years on the collegiate sidelines, he spent 10 years as an assistant coach with these same Kings. He left the club in 2006 to spend more time at his home in New Jersey, however, after a turbulent season in Sacramento, Geoff Petrie asked him to come back as a consultant to help the team.

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“He’s really excited about rejoining the club and adding some of his experience and understanding of the game,” said Petrie, who played for Carril at Princeton before becoming the Kings’ vice president of basketball operations. “I look forward to seeing him back here.”

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Coach Carril is best known for developing the famed offense known as the “Princeton Offense,” which strongly emphasizes the fundamentals of good shooting, passing, and back-door cuts. Having run the Princeton offense in college, I must say it is much more complicated than what I just previously described, but for the sake of a short blog post, you get the gist. The offense truly takes a high level of basketball intelligence to outperform the defense.

One of my favorite quotes from Carril comes via one of his former players and former Knicks' great and U.S. Senator Bill Bradley. Bradley says in his book Values of the Game,

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“Pete Carril of Princeton tells a story from his childhood that every college athlete should ponder. Carril’s father worked in an open-hearth steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Every morning before he left for work and Pete and his sister for school, he’d turn to them at the breakfast table and say, “In this life, the big strong guys are always taking from the smaller, weaker guys but… the smart take from the strong. “

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Image Source: NY Times