Zen and the art of scoring 100 points has Rowan NCAA bound

So let’s start here. How does Rowan even practice to score 92.7 points a game? Some keys beyond the obvious task of taking a lot of basketball shots?

“Messiness – it really is,” Joe Crispin said the other day, his 22-5 Profs ready to toss a little more madness into March, back in the NCAA Tournament and hosting a first-round game Friday against Cal Lutheran.

Even if earning the right to host games after winning the New Jersey Athletic Conference, earning one of the 16 top seeds, is enough proof of concept, might Crispin pump Rowan’s brakes a bit deeper into postseason play? No chance, he said. Zen and the art of scoring 100. Crispin could write that book.

“The best shot is the one where you mean it,” Crispin said, sitting in his office this week before practice. “I always ask guys when they take a risky shot, ‘Did you take it with conviction?’”

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This is what it’s like talking to Rowan’s basketball coach. The man will take you on a ride. (Let him.) The former Pitman High legend and first-team all-Big Ten guard at Penn State, who also had a brief two-team NBA stint in addition to playing professionally overseas, said it’s hard coaching his way.

“But it’s hard for different reasons,” Crispin said. “You’re kind of teaching on the fly. I’m essentially trying to teach the kids how to score with their gut. I’m trying to train their gut.”

His current players have talent, Crispin added, and that helps a whole lot as he puts everyone in this aggressive, attacking mindset. Part of the teaching, he said, is training the gut that percentages don’t work for a certain shot, or another player with a seemingly harder shot is in the flow, so get it to him.

The messiness? Trying to find that flow. Crispin described his practice plan for this day, three days before the NCAA tournament, as “semi-messy.” Into the gym, sure enough. Crispin has a regimented practice plan, with exact minutes on the clock, all of it followed. But the first five minutes after the warmup were titled, “Passing Tag,” and balls and players moved in all sorts of directions, organized chaos baked in, with trash-talking and laughing, players lunging out of the way of movement happening from the opposite way.

“Training guys to play as if we were on a busy playground,” Crispin said. “I was into scoring. It’s a non-negotiable for me. I’m 100 percent committed to trying to score 100 points every game. That’s true, not just generally. It’s true tomorrow. It’s true Friday. It’s true Saturday.”

Which does not mean anything goes.

“If you’re on a busy playground and the ball doesn’t get to the right guy, you don’t get picked up next time,” Crispin said. “This is the way the game is played. If you aren’t sensitive to that, and you just come in and jack up shots, and that happens, you don’t get picked up. You’re not on my team anymore. You get taken out. Well, why? ‘I was open.’ Get a feel for the game, man. You were open, might be a reason you were open and he wasn’t. Get him the ball. That’s how we talk.”

Also, this: “I want the kids to be very confident that no matter what the opponent does, they have the answer – not me,” Crispin said. “I’m trying to teach our players to be master puzzle-solvers. The way you do that isn’t by giving them the same puzzle all the time, or the same answers every time. It’s by changing the puzzle every day.”

No Division I men’s team scored as much this season as Rowan. The three Division II programs that did, one level up, all have been very successful this year. In Division III, a different story. The top scoring team in DIII, Greenville, went 7-19, giving up crazy amounts of points. Cross that out as a model. Grinnell, second in DIII in scoring, the poster child for high-volume college scoring in recent years, also has a losing record. Same for Hunter. So put a line through them all. Rowan University, of Glassboro, N.J., is the highest scoring DIII program with a winning record. This old gym is a proper laboratory. This season, Rowan went over 100 points 10 times, gave up 100 three times.

You have to practice building a lead, Crispin said, and coming back from way down. That can be messy, he added, building rhythm, searching for it.

One interesting aspect of all this … In addition to being surprisingly efficient on offense, finishing third in the NJAC in assist-turnover ratio, Rowan does not ignore defense. The Profs were first in the NJAC in field-goal percentage defense.

“Oh, we play defense,” Crispin said in his office. “The numbers are good. … Speeding up the game, shortening possessions, being disruptive, but in a not-so-obvious way, maybe.”

Some rules: They’re going to trap, “or fake trap,” probably 70% of the time. A fake trap doesn’t seem like much, Crispin said, but it’s disruptive. In scouting, the coach says, he looks for things he doesn’t see in opponents. Let’s make them do that, see how they handle it.

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“We can play it different ways … but it’s always pressure-oriented,” Crispin said. “The rule is, we’re not just going to sit back and let you run your stuff. That’s the rule. We always want to play defense in a way that disrupts their rhythm but promotes our own.”

Good logo on a gym wall at least.

“That’s like my baseline principle,” Crispin said. “There’s been times when we played defense that disrupted our own rhythm. We don’t want to do that.”

A bad shot for Crispin? As much as Crispin finds comfort standing out from the crowd, he could be John Chaney or Jay Wright or Fran Dunphy in this answer. Basketball itself has core principles. A bad shot?

“No shot,” Crispin said. “Get one. My 12-year-old knows it. The only difference, philosophically, I don’t believe that the shot that presents itself in seven seconds is going to be that much worse than 17 or 27. I just don’t. It’s often better, so you take it.”

Analytics have come along to confirm that thought. But some old guy also comes along and says, OK, all fine, all season, but in the postseason, you have to tighten things up as everyone plays defense like every possession is do-or-die.

“I say, who’s trying?” Crispin said. “They say, that doesn’t work in the tournament. Well, unlikely, if only one person’s trying. But if 20 try, that’ll work. … What are we talking about? It’s a thought exercise. It doesn’t make any sense.”

If you’re thinking about Loyola Marymount, with Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, Paul Westhead coaching, a trio of Philly folks who turned heads from a campus by Los Angeles International Airport, Crispin said of living with lesser defense to get the ball back, “We’re not that extreme.”

How does this play into recruiting?

“I think recruiting is more about attraction than it is pursuit,” Crispin said. “I really believe that. And I’ve always believed that. And it’s the reason why we gave up 113 points my first game [as a head coach in 2016] to Neumann. I didn’t care. I should have changed with five minutes left – I should have changed my defense. But it’s my first game, who cares, nobody expects us to win, they were good. I just want to score 100 points.”

That was the goal his whole first season, even as Rowan gave up as many as it scored.

“You have to show that you’re going to lose with something before a player takes you seriously,” he said.

Sounds like BS? Not in this laboratory.

“You have to define what you’re willing to lose doing,” Crispin said. “If you’re willing to lose a game 100-99 – I would point that out early. Now, it’s obvious. Because it works. … I have to play in a way that my players want to play.”

Joe and his brother and Pitman and Penn State backcourt-mate Jon came from a family of players and coaches.

“I was a natural-born questioner of coaches,” he said. “I wasn’t easy to coach.”

His late Pitman High school coach, Craig Harper, was the most influential for him, Crispin said, because Harper “was not a basketball person per se, but he was an aggressive person. … If he was in a fistfight, he was throwing the first punch. … You want to run with us? You’ll pay. It became so core to me. I always say to the players, I always want to create a program that I could play in.”

Not as easy as people think, Crispin said, “because I was a free-wheeling, off-the-dribble, shoot-from-deep player. There was no mold for that when I was in high school or college. When I was in the pros, there wasn’t a mold.”

Steph Curry changed the world. Different game now.

“A way different game,” Crispin said. “Not that I’d be better today. It’s a different game. They’re better. Back then, I would come off a ball screen and be wide open. The NBA was the easiest place I ever scored. No exaggeration. There was no hedging the ball screen back then. It was just 7-foot slow guys in the paint.”

That high school attacking influence, Crispin said he never let go of it. Between high school and college, he scored over 4,600 points.

“Even at Penn State, when they would tell me, we don’t want you to do this – I was a rebel,” Crispin said. “I would go, this is what I do. I wasn’t out of control. I was a point guard my freshman year. I ran the show. But I took fadeaways, I took deep threes. I never let that go. That was my identity. They would say, we don’t want you to shoot a fadeaway. I’d go, ‘I’m a 6-foot white guy in the Big Ten. I’m going to shoot a fadeaway and I’m going to make it.’ That’s how I operated, right?”

He brought up a Rowan player who maybe doesn’t pass enough, dribbles too much, finds weird shots. Right, Crispin says, and he scores over one point a possession. If most coaches don’t have a category for that, Crispin said his task is to find one. “You adjust,” Crispin said. “Not him.”

One of his mantras: “I still think like a player – I’m a player, that’s who I am.”

An old teammates jokes with him: I don’t even know if you’re a coach yet, you’re just a player who can’t play.

“Another conviction I have – what are we doing right now that in 25 years we’ll know is stupid?” Crispin said. “Nobody thinks that way. I don’t understand it. We’re doing things that are dumb. I think some of it is playing slow, having too many timeouts, like it’s American football. Having too many games in the 50s.”

More a soccer guy than a football guy?

“That’s exactly what I say – way more soccer,” Rowan’s coach said. “Or it would be a hurry-up offense at all times in football. It doesn’t mean that you don’t use structure. But the best structure to me is the one that’s hidden.”