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SACRAMENTO — The difference between the sports film and life is monotony. The mundane. The monthly, weekly, daily and minute-by-minute routines, the things you force yourself to do until you no longer dwell, the menial tasks you train yourself to accept. A college basketball career is full of them. It’s practically made of them. Shootaround, walkthrough, weightlifting, running, ice tub, film study, class. Ball screen, hedge, drop, close out. Slide your feet. Make 100 free throws. Make 1,000 3s. Repeat.
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If you’re doing it right, at the moment of asking, when it would be easiest to let something slip, the habits are still there for you. You’ll know what to do.
Matt Allocco knew what to do. He might have been the only one. The arena around him had tilted off its axis; fans huffed and heaved; the colors bled. Over in the corner, Arizona guard Courtney Ramey was on the floor, already crying, being consoled by his coach. Princeton coach Mitch Henderson ran halfway up the sideline. The other Wildcats glared at the scoreboard and chewed on their shirts. Princeton players hopped around in uncertain directions. Arizona had missed several shots on its penultimate offensive possession of the game; Princeton had the rebound. The Wildcats fouled. The Golden 1 Center howled.
And then Allocco — the last sane man in a place gone feral — put his hands over his head and screamed. “HUDDLE!” Princeton players snapped out of their fugue. Allocco brought them together.
On the cusp of a historic upset over No. 2 seed Arizona, Allocco had his moment to deliver one final piece of stirring commentary, one last monologue as the strings crescendoed and audience dabbed at tears. What did he say?
“Honestly? Just coverages,” Allocco said. Who guards whom. “If we’re up three, what’s the coverage? If we miss here, what do we do? Do we switch on defense? Does everybody know?”
And there it is. This is why Princeton won, 59-55.
Not just that moment, Allocco’s cool head in the face of shiver-inducing anxiety. But what it represents. Engagement. Thoroughness. Discipline. No. 15 seed Princeton beat a heavily favored Arizona team, a popular Final Four pick, with its All-America big man Azuolas Tubelis, by doing all of the mundane little things right. It is no more complicated than that. Princeton won everything on the margins. The scout. The game plan. The defensive execution. The huddles at every timeout, all five guys on the floor, no stragglers, no exceptions, no matter how likely the win looks. It was a win for details — the outcome a proud program expected no matter what anyone else thought.
“In that moment, it’s a pretty surreal feeling,” Allocco said. “But I also can’t say I’m surprised.”
Make it three straight years of a 15-seed upsetting a 2-seed in #MarchMadness
◽️ 2023 – Princeton beat Arizona
◽️ 2022 – Saint Peter’s beat Kentucky
◽️ 2021 – Oral Roberts beat Ohio State pic.twitter.com/cz0fHtNUZh— The Athletic CBB (@TheAthleticCBB) March 16, 2023
It was almost unnerving, this confidence. A half hour after the final buzzer, walking in to the locker room, the Tigers were already fairly calm. They had soaked their coach, because of course, but now they sat quietly, a few of them talking to reporters, the others taking off tape and checking their phones. Most were still in their uniforms.
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What they had done was play an almost perfect game. If you want to beat Arizona, you have to make life horrible for its bigs. This is easier said than done. Tubelis is a remarkably persistent scorer; he finds angles when there are none. Oumar Ballo is massive with a light touch. If the Wildcats get their offense flowing, and the ball is moving quickly in transition, Tubelis gets layup after layup downhill. If you can halt that reliable source of Arizona points, and hold fast in post defense, you make the Wildcats swing and kick and play deeper into shot clocks than they’re comfortable with.
Princeton did everything right. Tommy Lloyd’s team averages around 72.1 possessions per game (adjusted), which was the 12th-fastest tempo in all of college basketball this season. Princeton forced them into 67, and held them to just 55 points. Tubelis shot 9-of-20 from the field. His 22 points were mostly forced through the body of another unrelenting Princeton defender. He never got clean looks. He cut a frustrated figure the entire game. He never found any rhythm, turning the ball over six times. He stood forlornly in the post with his hand up while Princeton buzzed around him. He looked alone. The same was true of Ballo, who in 6-foot-9, 240-pound Keeshawn Kellman faced the rare opponent strong enough to keep the Malian from getting to the very front of the rim. “All five run back on defense,” Kellman said, reciting the game plan. “The first big to get back stops the quick duck-in, and the second is there for help. Build a line around the rim. Hold it.”
Stops turned into more stops, which eventually turned into the kind of panic that seeps into heavily favored teams when they feel that something is off. Arizona players later admitted they felt a lack of energy in their performance. It showed. It is not to diminish Princeton’s accomplishment to admit the Wildcats were very bad. There were sloppy passes, ill-advised shots. When the Wildcats got the ball up the floor quickly, and moved people around, they were able to get Tubelis moving toward the rim. But when they casually dumped the ball into the post — and they did it all the time — Princeton was always ready to pounce. “When you want to do great things in life, you’ve got to be willing to step in some dog s— once in a while,” Lloyd said. “And we did today.”
Even so, Arizona had a 10-point lead with seven minutes to play. For all of their defensive dedication, the Tigers couldn’t make shots on the other end. The talent gap was still glaring. They finished 4-of-25 from 3. The post defense was so reliable, though, that Arizona shot just seven free throws (and didn’t march to the line the way it often does when that offense gets bogged down). Princeton could manage to scrape together just enough — Tosan Evbuomwan pivoting to the rim, a Ryan Langborg layup, the go-ahead jumper at 55-54 — to eventually make the math work.
It was an incredible finish. The Tigers were the least impressed of anyone with themselves. They celebrated on the floor with their fans, of which there were thousands, because of course they did, but then they coolly walked off, no more visibly excited than when the game began. When it was time for media duties, Henderson, Allocco, Evbuomwan and Caden Pierce relatively quietly made their way into the Golden 1 Center elevator that takes them up to the media room; when they were on the elevator, they were silent. Henderson got a few hugs and congratulations along the way, but there was nothing like the yelling you expect from kids who have just done something remarkable.
“We talk confidently,” Henderson said. “The group believes in it. We thought we could win. With four minutes left, I told them we were going to win the game.”
Confidence is a strategy. Henderson arrived in Sacramento hoping to be “intentional” — his word — about not siphoning off attention or energy from his players. A specter haunts Princeton tournament teams: The 1996 win over UCLA. The Win. It is not a bad thing, obviously; it’s one of the most revered upsets in college hoops history. But it can sometimes be the only thing people want to talk about on the day before a Princeton NCAA Tournament — not least because Henderson played on that team.
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It can be easy to tap Princeton on the head. Aren’t they cute? Remember 1996? Those swoopy orange warmups on the bench? Ah, nostalgia. Thank you for the reminder. Now go ahead and lose to whatever highly seeded high-major has been scheduled for you.
For now, for at least this weekend, Henderson was desperate to keep the focus on the present. The Tigers wear a ribbon in honor of legendary coach Pete Carrill, who died in August; the topic is less an item of interest than a part of their program DNA. Princeton’s history informs everything they do, up to including that within reason they expect to be good.
“They’ve been talking about making their own memories,” Henderson, the subject of the iconic photo of that game, which hangs everywhere in the Princeton basketball facilities, said Wednesday. “That’s my charge. Rather than reaching into some anecdote for inspiration, or reminiscing about the good times and what it means, Henderson wanted Princeton’s players to focus entirely on themselves, on the opportunity ahead of them.
“At the end of the day they still they have to guard us and play us,” Henderson said. “I think these games, in these moments, you have to remember what got you here. This is amazing to be here and be together. And you have to be yourself.”
Princeton’s upset win wasn’t built on a stirring speech or Vaseline-tinted remembrances of one day 27 years ago. It was constructed from much more run-of-the-mill parts. Detail, mundanity, focus. Coverages in the huddle when the rest of the arena has tilted on its axis.
It is stuff that is almost impossible to harness fully. Arizona didn’t have it. Teams that do that can do anything. Princeton knew this before tip. The theory holds.
(Top photo of Princeton’s Blake Peters: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)