Jeff Bzdelik has spent enough time in North Carolina as an assistant basketball coach at Davidson, homeowner in Sunset Beach and father of a student at Wake Forest to know the geography of the state pretty well.
"Princeton is in New Jersey," Bzdelik said yesterday. "We're in North Carolina."
Bzdelik, named yesterday as Wake Forest's head basketball coach, said he will mold his offensive and defensive schemes around the talent on hand. In his past two head-coaching positions, at Air Force and Colorado, he used a modified form of the Princeton offense, which has traditionally been employed by teams seeking to overcome a deficiency in talent and ability.
Bzdelik was clearly sensitive to the connotation.
"Everybody talks about the Princeton offense," Bzdelik said. "I've been coaching a long time. I'll take the talent I have and adjust it to what we need to do.
"I don't know where people get all this stuff, like, ‘What are you going to do, hold the ball?' No we're not going to hold the ball."
Wake Forest faced two teams last season that ran the Princeton offense, with mixed results. The Deacons lost to William & Mary 78-68 on Nov. 28 and beat Richmond 74-68 in overtime on Dec. 31.
The intent of the Princeton offense is to spread around the perimeter, draw the defense away from the basket area and then look for either precise backdoor cuts or open jumpers.
"Are we going to pass the ball to one another?" Bzdelik asked, rhetorically. "Well, yeah. You know what? Everybody passes it.
"Good teams pass the ball to one another and have good spacing. It's just sound basketball, right? You take good shots. But you can score a lot of points taking good shots.
"We beat Texas Tech the last home game at Colorado and scored 101 points. You take good shots and you do it with spacing. Now if you don't have great shooters, you can't get spacing on the court.
"Now you're going to have to find something that will work for what you have, plain and simple."
The Buffaloes averaged 74.6 points a game in 2009-10, seventh most in the Big 12, while Wake Forest averaged 72.8 points, fifth most in the ACC. But the Deacons were much better defensively, ranking third in the conference by allowing opponents to shoot just 39 percent from the floor.
Colorado ranked last in the Big 12, allowing teams to make 46.2 percent of their field-goal attempts.
"I like creating offense off our defense," Bzdelik said. "I like getting deflections. No question.
"The average NBA player shoots 48 percent when he's open. The average NBA player shoots 34 percent when he's got a hand in his face. I think in college it's very similar, maybe a couple of percentage points down. The average college player shoots about 45, 46 percent when he's open and the average college player with a hand in his faces shoots in the 20s somewhere. So just be rock-solid in terms of making people take contested shots.
"We'll do some trapping every now and then. I will change up defenses every now and then to not let teams get in a rhythm and take advantage of the length that we have."
The team that finished 20-11 last season at Wake Forest has largely departed with the graduation of seniors Ish Smith, L.D. Williams, Chas McFarland and David Weaver and the decision of sophomore Al-Farouq Aminu to make himself available for the NBA Draft.
The only regular starter returning is freshman guard C.J. Harris, although sophomore Tony Woods (who started nine games) and freshman Ari Stewart were in the regular substitution rotation. Junior Gary Clark played in 24 games and sophomore Ty Walker played in seven.
"I'm anxious to get on the court and work with these guys," Bzdelik said. "And we'll take what we feel that they do well and do something that will work to the best of their abilities both offensively and defensively."
dcollins@wsjournal.com
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