The Wisdom of Pete Newell
The quotes you’ll find here are all from Bruce Jenkins’ great book about Coach Newell called “A Good Man: The Pete Newell Story.” Get ready to discover some of Coach Newell’s valuable wisdom straight from the pages of this amazing book.
On Staying Humble
“Don’t ever allow yourself to think you invented the game, or any part of it. But it doesn’t mean you can’t refine what you borrow, Like reverse-action offense. I was given all the credit for it because so many teams used it after 1960. Even today, you see a form of it in the Chicago Bulls’ triangle offense; it’s a refinement of the same basic concepts. But hell, Jimmy Needles taught us that. I just added some things that we never did.”
On Creating Habits
“I believe you can never change a habit, or create one, with a word or a piece of chalk. You can talk all day, put all sorts of diagrams on the board, but a habit is not going to change. It’s a conditioned reflex, created by a repetitive act. Coaches say, ‘Stay down low, you gotta get low, but that doesn’t mean a thing if the kid hasn’t physically practiced to stay low. Habits are created through physical acts.”
On Players Figuring Things Out
“I wanted players with initiative, guys who could control a difficult situation on their own. People may not realize that years ago, you couldn’t bring a player over to the sideline to talk to him. Players had to stand out in the middle of the court during your timeout. They changed that rule during my second year in coaching l1947] and I was madder than hell. I felt my team could always interpret what I was teaching; we didn’t need all these damn meetings. And that’s the way Jimmy was. The players have to know what they’re doing and why! I didn’t want my players depending on me. I figured I’d teach ’em during the week, and when the game comes along, it’s up to them. That’s one reason I didn’t like to call timeouts. I didn’t want the players thinking that every time they got in a little jam, I’d bail ’em out. I wanted to make them figure it out.”
On Part-Method Teaching
“Part-method teaching tells a kid why he’s doing something. In five-on-five drills you’re not teaching you’re coaching. Break it down to one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three, go through every option of the offense and defense, and the players will understand why you’re doing it. And if they make mistakes, you can point it out. The parts make the whole. It’s like vour car engine; you work on the sparkplugs or the carburetor or whatever’s causing the problem. You don’t have to get rid of the whole motor. I got a taste of part-method teaching from Jimmy Needles, but I really learned it from Tony Hinkle when I played on his Navy team at Great Lakes [Illinoisl, and to this day it’s the whole basis of my coaching. You reach the point ideally, where players come up with strategy they didn’t get from me. Usually it was on defense. That’s where I gave players the most leeway to interpret situations. Anticipate things, do a quick double-team, go for an interception. Use your head. Cover up for your teammate if he’s beaten.”
On the Importance of Your Feet
“So many players have never had anyone appeal to their intellectual side. I’m trying to make them comprehend not only the ‘how’ but the ‘why.’ In a basketball game, a player will have the ball in his hands for maybe four minutes. But he’ll have his feet on the court for maybe 40. Everything you do in basketball relates to your feet. Your movement. Your stops. Your jumping and positioning. What I try to make ’em understand is that they’re right-footed or left-footed, just like people are right-handed or left-hand- ed. They’re undeveloped on one foot, not as comfortable stepping off and driving on that foot or moving in that direction defensively. So we develop confidence and strength in using the weaker foot. For an entire day we’ll do every drill on one side of the court, with one pivot foot. The next day we switch sides and use the other foot. How to receive a ball, beat a denial defense, make a reverse drive to the hoop, take a rocker step, an explosion step, a step off a pick.”
On Developing Your Left Foot
“He didn’t have real good foot discipline then. He’d shoot foul shots with one foot behind the other, didn’t establish his pivot foot, things like that. In fact, I used Bernard to illustrate something one day. I told him, I want you to kick this ball. Go ahead, kick it. And he kicked the hell out of it. Everybody’s thinking, jeez, the old man’s blown his top. We haven’t even started yet, and he’s gone over the edge. Then I said, ‘Here, kick it again with your left foot. And he just sort of squibbed it over to the side. Almost got a hernia doing it. I said, that’s what this thing is all about. If you’re going to develop your left hand so you can go both ways, doesn’t it seem logical that we develop the left foot? And most of the guys had never heard anything about this.”
Transitioning From Offense to Defense
“That’s something you don’t see today. Offensive thinking very rarely encompasses an immediate adjustment to defense. We always tried to set up a triangle for rebounding. The forward on the strong side rebounds at the foul line. Whoever’s at the post, he rebounds on the strong side of the basket. The weakside forward takes the weak side. We were always looking ahead to that taking the other team out of their offense while we still had the ball. I don’t want a prevent defense. Football shows you how well that works – it’s a big failure every time, and for the same reason it fails in basketball: You don’t have pressure on the ball. You can have six defensive backs in there, but they’ll still complete the pass if you don’t pressure the passer. So make sure that’s where you start your defense.”
Transitioning From Offense to Defense (Part 2)
“We were always solid. Sound. Our offense always complemented our defense. lf guys were a little out of position, they got into position. Everybody had a job. Your guards don’t retreat downcourt, they play their guys man-to-man. The safety man is the guy at the foul line. You’re not trying to steal the ball, necessarily, you’re trying to defuse the break. I lecture on this today, and a lot of college coaches don’t know what I’m talking about. But with the three-point shot, it’s more important than ever to put pressure on the ball, stop the flow, because transition offense is such a key part of the game today. I draw a direct parallel with football and the prevent defense. That’s a perfect example of what not to do. As soon as you stop pressuring the ball, the quarterback suddenly becomes all-world.”
Emphasis on Defense
“Everything to me is calculated toward the defense, and letting the players know they can assert themselves. It’s a little different on offense. I can’t tell you, ‘Take care of that ball, because if you don’t you could screw up everything.’ That’s going to make you tentative. I don’t have to teach you the value of the ball. You know damn well if one of your teammates dove on the floor and got a loose ball, you’re not gonna throw a half-ass careless pass. If I’m playing a big game, I’ll tell the players right at the beginning, ‘Go right out after ’em. Let’s not be taking a timeout after 10 minutes to find we’re on our heels.’ I never liked to see people playing out of the fear of making a mistake.”
On “Weak Side” Help
“The idea of coming from the weak side to help a defender on the ball — that was Jimmy’s concept. It was played by other teams, but not as religiously as we learned to follow it. The idea is, you never want to be a head-turner. Make sure that both the ball and your man are in your vision, and that means having good defensive position. In the East at that time, they taught that regardless of where the ball is, you guard your man. There wasn’t much weakside help. Our defense was always the opposite. We were always helping the person guarding the ball, because he’s the only guy who can shoot it. And we emphasized good vision; if I can see you when you start a cut, I can beat you on the cut.”
On “Hands Up” Drill
“You start with the fact that there’s only one way to play defense: Shuffle your feet, knees bent, hands up. That is the correct defensive posture — although you’d never know it watching some players today. Any other way is wrong. The inside hand should be in the shooter’s face to disconcert him. The other arm extends almost parallel to the floor to deny passes. The player shuffles because that allows him to slide with the man he’s guarding. Cross your feet, you might lose your balance. When you think about it, basketball is a lot like boxing — the footwork is similar. Our drill is designed to keep the knees flexed and the hands up high; we just get along without the jabs and hooks. A boxer is only as good as his knees. That’s how it is in basketball, too. The surest way to be knocked out in either sport is to drop your hands.”
On “Hands Up” Drill (Part 2)
“We’d do the hands-up drill for long periods of time without a stop, which demands a real reserve. I’d start the hands-up on the first day of practice for about three minutes. Quick break, then another three minutes with the opposite hand and foot facing forward. The next day, maybe four minutes. Third day, five minutes, then up to six and seven. Without even realizing it at the time, I was developing my players’ left foot absolutely demanding that the left foot does the same thing as the right. Day after day I teach that routinely now, but back then, it really helped our balance and footwork development. We finally worked up to 20 minutes at a time which is sheer hell if you’re not in shape.”
On Pressing Defense
“We had different versions of the press, and they complemented each other. Right off I might show you, say, a three-quarter press. I called it a ‘cowards press.’ It would give you an image of the real thing, but all we’re doing is trying to determine what your counter is, what you’ve been practicing all week. We’re just giving you the illusion, not the real thing Then, when we had a pretty good idea, we’d go to our full-bore zone-press defense, which would be the complete opposite of what we’d shown ’em so far. Suddenly all the defensive responsibilities have changed, and we’re much more aggressive than before.”
On Tempo
“We want to make the other team play a game we think we can play better. We do this by making them play at a speed they’re not used to. When we play a ball-control team, we quicken the tempo, and they start resembling a guy who takes a certain amount of time each day to shave a certain way. One day he’s five minutes late, so he has to hurry up and he cuts himself. When we play a fast-breaking team, we try to slow down the tempo. We stop the fast break by pressuring the rebounder. We also choke the outlet pass to the guard. And we don’t retreat. A man-to-man aggressiveness is very important. Don’t concede.”
On Switching Defenses
“We’d yell ‘Zone!’ And as soon as they went into the zone attack, we’d switch to the man-to-man. We had really practiced this, just to screw ’em up. It had to be the last thing Phil expected, because I never played a zone. So they’re playing man we were in the zone, playing zone when we’re in the man, and they’re just having a hell of a time.”
On Valuing the Ball
“I always taught the value of the ball, and I’d teach ball possession in a positive way. I’d put my regulars on defense and play the second team on offense in practice. We’d play a 10-point game with a lot of pressing. Every time we forced a turnover, we get a point. Positive reinforcement. Rather than say, ‘Don’t do this, it was more like, When you force the opponent to throw the ball away, you’re costing them a point.”
On Playing Zone Defense
The reason I never played zone is because I believe so strongly in habits, and how you develop them…Here’s the problem I have with that (playing zone defense): A habit is a conditioned reflex, something you’ve performed so often, it becomes second nature. Do you believe you can have two different habits for the same response? Take a guy playing man-to-man. I think we all agree he has to stay low, he’s gotta have midpoint vision, he’s responsible for a man and he has to be aggressive, with good communication with his teammates. Now you call a timeout and put your guys in a zone. All of a sudden your player has a higher stance, his vision’s on the ball, he’s only responsible for an area — not a man — and it’s a passive defense. Now you tell me: after you’ve played a zone, how can you tell players to go back to those ingrained habits – aggressiveness, denying the ball, good vision, help, communication? All those things are different now. How can you just call a timeout and expect them to go from one to the other?”
On Reverse-Action Offense
“A really sound offense will have that variety. With reverse action, we’d have a screener, a cutter and a passer, and if you had the three minds working together at the same time, you’d get a real good shot. We’d play the screener at three different positions, at various times, depending on how the defense was playing our cutter. And the cutter would do any number of things sometimes he would cut across, sometimes he’d fake here and come to the foul line, all depending on the defense. I wanted my passer to read that defensive man, just like the cutter and screener are reading it. It’s precise. If they all read it, the defensive guy is screened out. But you don’t just put it on a blackboard. We worked on it every day, repetitiously, until the players reacted instinctively. I see games today and it’s almost ludicrous the way some coaches hold up fingers or put up signs to show the play. This is a game of counters, and the players have to know those counters. Forget the signs and the timeouts. They see it and react what does it all add up to? Teaching. I was all right as a bench coach, but teaching is what I was good at, and I’m still good at it.”
On Coaching Good Offensive Players
“There’s an old axiom, the better your players offensively, the more you want to stay out of the way. You want isolation more than screens. Whether it’s cutting to the basket, going one-on-one, whatever, you want to isolate a player with superior ablity on the defensive man and basically clear the way.”
Having Freedom on Offense
“On offense, generally, I felt that too much initiative can kill you, so I inhibited my players more when they had the ball. But not entirely. They’d see a situation, communicate with each other and run their own play. Like a backdoor play, for example. People were saying, ‘God, Pete sure has a great backdoor play, and I’m sitting there wondering how the hell they came up with it.”
On Playing at Different Speeds
“Aside from all the options we had with our screening and cutting, we set ’em up at three different speeds. So they’d never quite know how we were playing or at what kind of rhythm. That’s how we always played. Our teams reached the point where there was no way they couldn’t create a shot — any time they wanted.”
On Making Reads
“Too many players make up their mind what they’re going to do before they get the ball. The first thing you do is look at the basket. You’ll see everything you need to see. If I read a guy’s playing me baseline, I come to the middle. If I’m determined to go baseline and the guy’s overplaying me there, bang, I’ve got a charge foul. If he’s loose and I’ve got the shot, I take it. If he’s real tight, I use my reverse. Everything’s a counter. Whatever he does, you’ve got a counter.”
On Coaching and Teaching
“Coaching and teaching are two different things. The coaching never turned me on that much, but I always enjoyed the teaching the practice sessions. As I look back, I was supposed to be one of the better teachers of the game. Hell, I’m 10 times a better teacher now. The reason is, all I do is teach. I’ve always been an advocate of the part-method style of teaching breaking it down to one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three. At the camp, that’s all I do. And I’ve found better ways to get my points across.
On Playing in Championship Games
“This is why teams play championship games so negatively. Especially the Super Bowl, with that two-week break; it’s all negatives. Don’t do this, don’t let ’em beat you here, don’t let ’em beat you there, don’t, don’t, don’t. Next thing you know, you’ve had just enough time to figure out what can go wrong. Later you wonder, ‘Jeez, our guys sure came out flat.’ That’s because they were coached to be flat. We all fall into this trap if we allow it. I used to tell our guys, the first time they get the ball, I want you to play a full-court press and knock somebody on his ass. I don’t care if you get a foul. Let’s make sure we’re the first ones to do something.”
On Winning a Championship
“We have proved again that a single individual is not the key to victory. You don’t get the feeling of belonging to a team if the accent is all on one man. There are jealousies and ill feeling. I want my boys to sacrifice personal gain for the good of the team. And they always have. They’ll go out into life with a better sense of values. They’ll look back on this with a warm glow of satisfaction.”
On Winning and Losing
“A winning streak retards improvement. A defeat gives a boy firmer resolve. The purpose of athletics is to teach stability and emotions. Such is the despair of losing and the joys of winning.”
On Bobby Knight
“He set that motion offense right on the floor of our living room. We had the chairs out, everything spread out all over the place. It was almost like a court, and Florence was right there with us. The thing was, Bobby understood that offense and he believed in it. What you do, you’ve got to know. Too often a coach will accept the tenets of another successful coach and go against what he’s seen and known himself. You might appreciate Bobby’s motion offense, but you don’t have the first clue how to teach it, how to break it down, how to put it together. But because Bobby Knight did it, by God. you’ll try it. Some guys don’t realize that a few lectures and a blackboard won’t win them the championship.”
On Bobby Knight (Part 2)
“The players Bobby picks to really come down on, like Steve Alford, are tough-minded kids. Bobby couldn’t faze Steve, no matter how upset he got. He generally knows the kids he can do this with. That’s what the great coaches do understand who they can kick in the butt, who they should pat on the butt. Goes all the way back to Knute Rockne, the first of the great psychologists. Speak softly to some, come down on others. I found myself doing the same thing.”
On Devising a Plan vs. Bill Russell
“So I devised game a plan. To keep Russell from blocking any shots, I had to keep him on the weak side of the court. To do that I had a steady stream of reverse action. And as the ball reversed, I would send Asplund to screen Russell. Well, nobody had ever really screened him, and he couldn’t understand what the hell was happening. Every time he tried to move, he’d run into a screen. And the referee didn’t pay much attention, because the ball was on the other side. Usually when you screen a defender, it’s to free his man. We screened Russell to free somebody else.”
On Defending Oscar Robertson
Our plan was to make Oscar work. Rene told me any time they got in a jam against the press, they’d bring Oscar back – remember, he was a forward to bring the ball up. We started right off with a press – not with the intention of stealing the ball, but to make Oscar come back and get it. After he did that, we’d fake pressure against him. Never committing ourselves, because you’d never get the ball away from him. He was like Magic Johnson that way. But make him work. When he gave up the ball, we denied him from getting it back. We rotated really well on him. Any time he beat somebody without the ball, someone else would rotate over. We had five guys concerned with Oscar.
On Jerry West
“I always felt Jerry studied the other team’s sets, because his defensive anticipation was so good. He knew where the passing lanes were, where the entries were gonna be, and he’d come out of nowhere to intercept the ball. This guy gave a clinic every time on a break situation, and he never made a mistake. He knew exactly when to pass, and where, when to pull up or go all the way. West and Russell both had an incredible ability to leap quickly, go straight up in an instant, just explode in your face.”
On the 1972-73 Knicks Championship Team
“Of all the NBA teams I’ve ever seen, that’s the one you could take to a high school, college, any level of the game and say, ‘This is how it’s played.’ There wasn’t one guy on that team, other than Frazier, who could create a good shot by himself. But they were selfless. They were all passers and set good screens for each other, and they played the best rotation defense. It was just a joy to watch them play. I’ve never seen a team before or since that epitomized the game that way.”
On Criticizing Players
“I never berated a player coming off the court or on the bench. Never in my life. I may have raised hell on the practice court, or watching films the next day, and sometimes it was my fault. But I wasn’t involved in blaming people. It was why, why, why. Because when you know the ‘why of something, you can do something about it.”
On Playing on the Other Team’s Court
“I was trying to teach him – and all my players that you can’t have everything you want in life. If the rims aren’t right, so be it. If it means a longer rebound, you make that adjustment. You simply don’t start throwing rocks at the other team or allow this negativism. And I never heard another word, from him or anybody else, about negative things on the other person’s court.”
Off-Court Discipline
“I was never a bed-check guy. I’m sure on weekends, they’d go out and get bombed like any other college kid. But most of the time you know, as long as nobody gets arrested that’s part of the social scene. Every year at the semester break, l’d tell ’em, if you want to go out and drink beer, I don’t mind. Just change your habits. Get basketball out of your mind. And I believe it to this day. I’ve got Bobby [Knight| believing in it. Once he gets to that part of the season, he practices his kids as little as possible. Staleness, to me, is mental fatigue. The only antidote for it is rest. I needed those breaks, too, because l’d agonize over every game in my sleep. I’d yell at officials, yell out strategy, hell, 1d wake up more tired than when I went to bed.”
On the Officials
I didn’t want my players getting on the officials, ever, no matter what the situation. If sports are to have educational benefits, you have to learn to handle the bad calls of the world and get on with your business. I didn’t want the officials to be a crutch, a scapegoat or a reason for not playing well. If you’re preparing a kid for a life after sports, you want him to think in positive terms and not be predisposed to thinking somebody’s gonna cheat him out of something. If I saw a kid even lose to mouthing off at an official, I’d take him out of the game.”
On Team Size
“There will always be a place for the little man in basketball. I wouldn’t want to have a team without one or two men of average height. Winning teams have a blend of height and playmaking, and a good little playmaker is better than the best big ones. To me, size is third after pride and balance. It’s hard to beat good athletes who take pride in their jobs, and it’s almost impossible if their community is proud of them.”
On Pregame Meals
“Ours was like a big family meal. I felt that whatever we’d done or not done in practice would dictate the outcome of the game, So now leť’s eat and have fun. There wasn’t some pearl of wisdom I was gonna give ’em. They already knew. They were students of the game, and they talked the game.”
On Recruiting Star Players
So often the star player I’d go to see, he’d have talent and all that, but he was a self-centered guy. Wouldn’t play both ends of the court. Wouldn’t play unless he had the ball in his hands. That really turned me off. I’m not gonna get a guy like that and try to change him. I’m not that optimistic about changing somebody who’s been one way for 18 years. That’s not my responsibility as a Coach. I’m not a social worker or a psychiatrist. I was more interested in kids who wanted to go to Cal. And guess I I had enough confidence in my ability to teach.”
On Practicing Over Break
“During the break, I wouldn’t even let the guys come on the court. I wanted ’em to change their habits, think about other things, and come back mentally refreshed. I sacrificed a little conditioning with all the time off, but mentally, I think the game was fun for them again — and without question, mental conditioning is just as important. I did this every year at the break, and more often than not, we’d be rising at the end of the year when the other teams had flattened out.”
On Practice Time
“I didn’t demand a lot of a player’s time, the way coaches do today, where you watch films morning, noon, and night. We didn’t overdo any of that stuff. In fact, we practiced less than two hours a day and that was it.”
On Coaches Protecting Each Other
“That was the great thing about coaches then — they were protective of each other. There was none of the envy or jealously like you see now. Hell, today, the guy in Nibs position says, ‘Oh God, he’s gonna make me look bad.’ Back then, we never thought of that.”
On Decisions and Money
“I’ve never made any decision based on money, and I’m happy I came from that direction. I’ve seen too many coaches get so caught up in the financial end, it detracts from what they are and what they should be.”
On Coaching and Money
“Any time you have a lot of money involved in anything you are going to have avarice and cheating. It turns the Coach into a businessman. He’s an entrepreneur instead of a teacher.”
