Sport
5 - Friday, March 30, 2012
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
Let the Ball Talk
Twenty-five seasons of the Beilein Offense
By Ben Estesdo
S Daily Sports Editor
o observe John Beilein explaining
his offensive strategy is an exercise
T in contrast.
Seated in his plush new office in the Bill
Davidson Player Development Center, it's
easy to be overwhelmed by the poshness.
The room is enormous and has its own sepa-
rate bathroom. The desk and fully-stocked
bookshelf at the back of the office scream
"importance."
"A "OLE -" But when Beilein begins to diagram his
offense on his basketball-court pin board,
the humble basketball lifer that he truly is
emerges. He's a coach who has feverishly
and ceaselessly studied the strategy of the
game his entire career - "one of the best X
and 0 guys in the business," in the words of
Mike Gansey, his star guard at West Virginia
who led the Mountaineers to the Elite 8 and
Sweet 16 in consecutive years.
Beilein rapidly moves the five pins around
the board, showing the wide variety of offen-
sive looks he uses. The only thing moving
faster than his fingers is his mouth, as he
breathlessly details what would be overly
complek to most.
You realize Beilein is in complete control
of this offense, and for good reason - it's
all his. Some may have similar principles
in their system, but the minutiae, terminol-
ogy and endless reads Beilein employs are
unique to him. Though the basics come from
some ancestral systems, he has morphed
and twisted his attack into something all his
4 own.
Ever wonder why you don't see other
teams running the Beilein system? It'd be
impossible. The only man who truly knows
its detailed intricacies is Beilein.
"You got these other systems that there's
a blueprint for, and every coach has his own
little wrinkles to it," said Rob Dauster, edi-
T ftor of the basketball blog Ballin' Is A Habit.
"John Beilein basically runs his own thing....
He created his own offense. It's really a lot of
fun to watch."
Beilein really had no choice but to do so.
He had no full-time assistants at LeMoyne
College, the Division II school he was coach-
ing at when he developed his system, so just
about every task for running the program fell
to him. He even drove the team van to road
games. With no assistants to bounce ideas
off, Beilein just devised an offense by him-
self.
DkS*_NBY ALICIA KOVALCHECK A LDEN REISS But for all the praise his system receives
now, in the beginning, the Beilein offense
was born of necessity.
"This isn't about the offense," Beilein said.
"It was about players who fit the offense."
out the floor and open ul. all kinds of cuts and
backdoor action.
Beilein mostly ignored his uncle's advice
at first. Then he happened to catch a Uni-
versity of Washington game on TV late one
night - an unheard-of phenomenon at the
time - and saw the Huskies running an
The exact date is lost to history. offense like the one Niland had described.
Thirty-four seasons and 1,037 games will Washington coach Andy Russo had got-
muddle the memory of any man, especially ten his job after a successful stint at Louisi-
one whose mind is in a state of constant ana Tech. (He had a si ar forward there by
frenzy, gears churning endlessly to try and the name of Karl Malone.) Within two sea-
devise the next way his team can get an edge. sons, he'd be out of Seattle and relegated to
It was the 1986-87 season when a young Division-II the rest of his career, but at the
Beilein met with his athletic director to dis- moment he was one of the hottest young
cuss the state of his team. coaches in the country.
Beilein was 33 and still near the bottom Beilein wrote to 'Russo and received in
of the coaching ladder, grinding away in his return a blue mimeographed ditto, worn
fourth season at LeMoyne, a Jesuit school in from years .of use. It diagrammed the two-
Syracuse, N.Y. guard offense of Jack Hartman, the famous
He was restless. coach at Kansas State who had retired the
The Dolphins weren't exactly struggling. year before. Its origins probably date to
Yes, they were coming off a 14-15 season, the famous coach Henry Iba of Oklahoma State
program's first losing record since 1982. But - both Russo and.Hartman worked on Iba's
the team was winning again that year, and staff at points in their careers.
would eventually finish 20-10. Ever cautious, Beilein slowly began to.
Still, Beilein wasn't satisfied. He didn't implement some of the two-guard offense's
like the way things were going offensively. principles. But by the next season, he was
For most of his career prior to LeMoyne, he convinced - this offense was perfect for his
ran a modified version of the flex offense. (In team. He went all-in and switched complete-
fact, he told at least one player that he helped ly to the two-guard, adding countless plays
Hall of Fame coach Jack Ramsay develop his to his offensive repertoire.
flex system when Beilein was dating Ram- LeMoyne went 24-6 in 1987-88 and quali-
say's daughter.) fied for the Division II NCAA Tournament
At LeMoyne, Beilein was running the tra- for the first time in 19 years, and the only
ditional three-guard, two-big-men, set-play time of Beilein's nine-year tenure.
offense that was the norm in college basket- The Beilein offense was born.
ball in those days. But it wasn't working for
his team.
Beilein's AD had a suggestion. You would
think the coach would be all ears - after all, Players that end up at LeMoyne will never
he was Beilein's boss. He also happened to be be the most athletic - it's Division II, after
Beilein's uncle. As if he needed more creden- all. Skills may often be in abundance, but a
tials, Tom Niland was also a Syracuse sports Division II player making it to the NBA is
legend. He was the basketball team captain akin to winningthe lottery.
at Canisius, a Division I school nearby, and Beilein had a team full of smart, skilled,
he later spent 27 years as LeMoyne's coach. disciplined players who lacked athleticism.
He eventually left his AD post after 42 years. But the two-guard offense makes up for lack
Niland had a simple piece of advice: play of athleticism with the way it spreads the
offense like he did back in the 1940s. Instead floor. ("Two-guard" is a bit of a misnomer the
of clogging the lane with two big men, move way Beilein operates, with four players on
one out to the perimeter. Back then, the lane the perimeter and just one player inside.) It
was only six feet wide (it looked exactly like a ' creates mismatches and shot opportunities
"key," hence the term), half as big as it is now, and what Beilein calls "leverage" through
so deploying two big men in the paint was a ball movement and cutting.
non-starter. Taking one out now would space It was the perfect offense for LeMoyne.
"We didn't really havea choice," said Dave
Niland, a guard from 1985-89 and also Tom's
nephew and Beilein's cousin. "It was the only
way we were going to win. We weren't going
to dunk on anybody."
In 1987-88, Beilein really went for it. He
moved 6-foot-4 guard Scott Hicks to the
"four," or power forward position, (20-plus
years before he would do the same thingwith
Zack Novak) and he inserted another guard,
into the lineup. Point guard Russell Barnes
wasn't much of a distributor, but he could
shoot, which was all the system required at
that point.
And a freshman named Len Rauch
emerged at the "five," or center position.
Rauch is now the all-time scoring leader for
LeMoyne, but he was also an expert passer
for a big man. (He recorded 168 assists in his
first season.)
Rauch's ability to dish the ball resulted in
plenty of looks from behind the 3-point line,
which had just been instituted by the NCAA
in 1986.
The Dolphin shooters took to the 3-pointer
well, hitting 44.6 percent of their attempts. If
Beilein had any doubts about his new system,
the 1987-88 season erased them.
"It was match made in heaven, if you will,"
Rauch said. "I wouldn't trade those years for
anything, playing for him."
The principles of the Beilein offense aren't
necessarily unique. The system rests on
plenty of downscreens; backscreens; hard,
precise cutting; lots of motion 3-pointers and
now, ball screens. It requires focus, effort,
teamwork, and most importantly, selfless-
ness.,
Even if every player won't be shooting the
ball on every possession, each will be touch-
ing it. The offense works because the play-
ers themselves and the ball move around so
much. Eventually, a defender will lose posi-
tion - that gives Beilein's players leverage,
meaning they've gained the advantage and
can drive or find a good shot.
But the system can only run efficiently if
its players are willing to sacrifice their points
and make the next pass, which will almost
always result in a better shot or better posi-
tioning. It's why Rauch says that unselfish-
ness is an "underlying fundamental" of the
offense.
"It's gotto be a guy that values the assist as
much as he values the score - a team player,"
Beilein said of the type of player he looks to
recruit. "Not that you can't teach that, but
we like to find guys that really feel the game
more than just their own game."
But every coach would like to have unself-
ish players, and every coach would like to
have a disciplined attack - look at any suc-
cessful team and you'll usually find those
traits.
What sets Beilein's system apart is its
open-endedness. On any given trip down the
court, there are countless possible ways for
the offense to unfold. It all depends on what
the defense does.
Run the offense,-see how the defense plays
it, then react accordingly. No matter how
the defense tries to stop the attack, there's
a way for the offense to respond - in fact, it
depends on responding to a defense based on
the way it tries to counter Beilein's action.
"It's sort of organized confusion, it's read
and react," Beilein said. "If one guy does one
thing, it changes the whole thing. ... Now
everybody's got to see that and go to the next
phase of it. ... Nobody talked about it, (it's
just) 'I saw what you saw, you saw what I saw,
we don't have'to call a new play.'
"The ball talked, and said 'run this
instead.'
It can be dizzying. That's an awful lot for
a college kid to process, and it doesn't help
that he has a defender hounding him as he's
trying to analyze the opposition and react
accordingly.
"You've just got to read every single little
part of the game when you're on the offen-
sive end," said senior guard Stu Douglass.
"It's tough sometimes.... You've justgot tobe '
ready for that (sudden change)."
For example, Jordan Morgan sets an off-
ball screen for Tim Hardaway Jr. in the cor-
ner. The defender prevents Hardaway Jr.
from coming off the screen. Hardaway Jr.
is supposed to read that and know that he
should fake a back cut and then try and cut
back again off Morgan's screen.
That's why Beilein's system also requires
intelligent players. But that's something he's
had at every stop of his peripatetic coaching
career.
See BEILEIN, Page 6
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