FAST & FURIOUS

Unbeaten Memphis has climbed to No. 1 using the Dribble-Drive Motion offense, a relentless and innovative attack that's all the rage among teams at all levels, from high school to the pros.

By Grant Wahl
SportsIllustrated

When hoops historians look back on the 2007-08 college basketball season, they may conclude that its most significant moment came in the summer evening, October 2003. At the head of a heavy oak table in his Memphis steak house sat Tigers coach John Calipari, who has led teams to both the Final Four and the NBA playoffs. Next to him was an obscure junior college coach from Fresno named Vance Walberg. For six days Walberg had observed Calipari's practices, continuing an annual pilgrimage that had given him deeper insight into the work of two dozen elite college coaches, from Bob Knight to Dean Smith to Billy Donovan.

But now, after the appetizers and the porterhouses had been cleared from the table, Calipari asked Walberg something that no other coach had bothered to ask him. "So tell me, Vance," he said, "what do you run?"

Walberg laughed. "You don't want to know," he replied. "It's a little bit off-the-wall."

"No, really," Calipari said. "Show me."

And so, using a pepper shaker as the basket, white sugar packets as offensive players and pink Sweet'n Low packets as defenders, Walberg explained his quirky creation, a high-scoring scheme featuring four perimeter players and a host of innovations. Unlike Knight's classic motion offense (which is based on screens) or Pete Carril's Princeton-style offense (which is based on cuts), Walberg's attack was founded on dribble penetration. To Calipari, at least, it embodied two wholly unconventional notions. One, there were no screens, the better to create spacing for drives. Two, the post man ran to the weak side of the lane (instead of the ball side), leaving the ball handler an open driving path to the basket.

But there was plenty more. As Walberg pushed the packets through the phases of his offense, Calipari experienced a new kind of sugar rush. Walberg's scheme was madness. It was genius.

And it was unlike anything Calipari, an old-school motion and play-calling acolyte, had ever run. "The players are unleashed when they play this way," he says, "because every player has the green light to take his man on every play." When Calipari junked his playbook and switched to Walberg's offense, his mentors thought he had lost his mind. "You've won hundreds of games playing a certain way, and now you're going to change?" Hall of Famer Larry Brown asked him. "And it's a junior college coach from California? What are you, crazy?"

Now look. Through Sunday, Calipari's Tigers were 23-0, ranked No. 1 in the nation and aiming to become the first team to enter the NCAA tournament undefeated since UNLV in 1991. But Memphis is only the tip of the Walberg iceberg, a spreading mass of teams using the Dribble-Drive Motion offense -- Calipari's felicitous term -- at every level of the game.

In Jersey City legendary coach Bob Hurley, who adopted the Dribble Drive Motion two seasons ago, has taken St. Anthony (19-0) to No. 1 in USA Today's national high school rankings. Likewise, Omaha Central High has won the last two Nebraska Class A state championships while running D.D.M., and Grand Valley High in Parachute, Colo., rode the attack to last year's Class 2A state title.

In California's Central Valley, where Walberg, 51, coached for 13 seasons at Clovis West High and four at Fresno City College, his high-pressure offense and defense have changed the way an entire region plays basketball. "It totally blew up here," says Fresno Central High coach Loren LeBeau, one of Walberg's former assistants. "We're in the top league in Fresno, and four of the six teams are running this style." Under coach Tom Gonsalves, the girls' team at St. Mary's High in Stockton has gone 25-0 and risen to No. 9 in the nation using D.D.M. Another practitioner, coach Jeff Klein at Chaffey Community College in Rancho Cucamonga, describes the system this way: "It's almost like Vance invented a new language."

The Denver Nuggets are running elements of D.D.M., and so are the Boston Celtics. "Calipari and I fax each other," says Celtics coach Doc Rivers. Meanwhile, one vocal D.D.M. skeptic has changed his mind. "If I were fortunate enough to get back into coaching, I'd seek Vance's help in a minute," says Brown, who joined Calipari and Walberg last September at a clinic in Mississippi attended by more than 400 high school coaches. "To see all these people who are incorporating what Vance does is mind-boggling."

It's enough to make you wonder: Who the hell is Vance Walberg? How is his offense spreading around the nation? And is his creation the hottest thing in U.S. basketball?

Where do innovators come from? An original idea -- the new NEW thing -- can be sparked anywhere, but the majority of college basketball's greatest innovators share a common trajectory: Unlike most of today's top coaches, who rose through the college ranks as assistants, they became head coaches early, often in anonymous hoops outposts. Carril was 24 when he became the jayvee coach at Easton (Pa.) High, the same age Knight was when he took over his first team, Army. Two of today's most respected innovators are Wisconsin's Bo Ryan, exponent of the Swing offense, who became the coach at Sun Valley High in Aston, Pa., at 26, and Michigan's John Beilein, who won the top job at Newfane (N.Y.) Central High at 22 and later came up with the Five-Out offense.

No matter how obscure the team, "when you're a head coach you get to tinkering with what you want," says Walberg, who was 22 when he took over at Mountain View (Calif.) High. As a high school grinder over the years -- Walberg said his real break came in 1997, when he had his Clovis West team use a cutting-edge "four-out" offense. (i.e., four perimeter players)

His best player, a heady, relentless point guard named Chris Hernandez (who would later star at Stanford), was such a skilled dribble-penetrator that Walberg moved his post man to the weakside block, clearing two bodies from Hernandez's path to the basket. When Hernandez broke down his defender he had several options: 1) shoot an open layup, 2) pass to the post man (if his defender left him to stop Hernandez), or 3) kick the ball out to an open teammate on the perimeter (if his defender had sagged to help out on Hernandez). The open player could shoot a three-pointer, but if one wasn't available, the team would attack again.

Because there were no screens and attackers were spaced so far apart, the formation opened huge gaps for penetrators, as long as they had the talent to beat their defenders and the smarts to read defenses on the fly. "The basis of the offense is to allow the players to attack when they have the ball. Get to the rim. It's basically here we come." All of Walberg's teams hear the same slogan. (we like three-pointers, but we love layups)

Walberg is sui generis. Since '97 he has added myriad phases, wrinkles and -- perhaps most important -- an elaborate set of competitive practice drills (with names such as Blood, Cardinal and Scramble) that hone the fundamentals necessary for the offense. "Have you seen Vance at practice? Oh, man," says Larry Brown. "His drills are all building blocks to his offense and defense, which is the key to coaching."

In fact, Calipari says he now does far more coaching in practice than during games, when he used to bark out play calls nearly every trip down the court. "The biggest strength of this offense," Walberg says, "is I feel we're teaching kids how to play the game and think for themselves instead of how to run set plays and be robots."

Dribble-drive is tailor-made for today's high school and college teams, which favor speed in the absence of classic back-to-the-basket big men, but it isn't for everyone. It requires quick, smart and talented guards who have a feel for the game. (See: Memphis point guard Derrick Rose.) It requires agile big men who can shoot from the perimeter and race downcourt. It requires deep benches and three-point shooters who can punish sagging man-to-man defenses and the inevitable zones. Not least, it requires complete commitment from coaches, who have to give up the control that comes with offensive play-calling and conventional half-court defenses.

Walberg is very committed to his system. He's still disappointed that Memphis's swarming defense -- the nation's best, holding opponents to 0.83 points per possession -- hasn't adopted his gambling full-court press, which Walberg's California converts contend is even more Promethean than his offense. "Vance believes so much in what he does," says Brown, a disciple of Dean Smith and Henry Iba. "The first time I met him we were talking about defensive principles, and everything I said, he'd say, 'No, no, no, you can't do it that way.' I'd say, 'Well, Coach Dean Smith taught me this.' And he'd still say, 'No, no, no.' Is he not a character?"

Walberg may have been a mad scientist, but he won games at an astonishing rate, usually with less talent than his opponents had. In the five years after it adopted his offense, Clovis West went 159-18, and during Walberg's four seasons at Fresno City College (2002-06) the Rams went 133-11, winning the '05 state juco title and regularly averaging more than 100 points a game. Nuggets assistant John Welch constantly observed Clovis West practices during his days at Fresno State under Jerry Tarkanian. He recalls, "People used to think it was funny: Why is a college assistant always over there with a high school coach? But I've been around some unbelievable coaches -- Tark, Hubie Brown, Mike Fratello, now George Karl and Tim Grgurich -- and I've learned as much from Vance as from anybody else."

By the summer of 2003 Welch had joined Hubie Brown's Memphis Grizzlies staff. One day he called his friend Calipari. "I've always respected Johnny Welch," says Calipari. "He's a basketball junkie, knows coaches, studies the game. He says, 'Look, I've got a guy coming in here, and I want him to spend some time with you. You ought to look at his offense.' "

Why change? It may seem obvious now that they're coaching the nation's top-ranked teams in college and high school basketball, but Calipari and Hurley didn't need to overhaul their systems. Calipari, 49, had won 336 games in college and the NBA and had reached three Sweet 16s, two Elite Eights and a Final Four when he and Walberg sat down for dinner that night at Cal's Championship Steakhouse. During his first three seasons at Memphis, however, Calipari had coached in only one NCAA tournament game. "It's like you're a teacher, and you're teaching for 15 years, and your lesson plan never changed," he says. "This has been invigorating for me because it's gotten me to think, to study the game again."

Hurley, 60, had won 22 state championships, nearly 900 games and two mythical national titles as head coach at St. Anthony when he adopted dribble-drive in the fall of 2005. "I've had very few original thoughts in my life," Hurley says, "but I'm smart enough to take from people who are successful and seem to have a greater view of the game. We got to a point where kids spent more time in the weight room than out on the court working on skills. The Dribble-drive gets you working on skills. You can move your center around. It doesn't have to be mud-wrestling where just the stronger, more physical, more athletic kids win."

A born promoter, Calipari also came up with the name Dribble-Drive Motion for the offense but has also branded it "Princeton on steroids."

Whatever you call it, Calipari's team is smitten. "It turned out to be great for us," says swingman Chris Douglas-Roberts, one of the nation's most gifted penetrators. "It's about spacing and players making plays. A lot of players who are in conventional styles get bored sometimes because they feel like they can't show what they can do, but this offense lets a player show his strengths."

Although Calipari didn't adopt Walberg's scrambling full-court defense, he did transform his defense in one major way. He says that during his days at UMass, from 1988 to '96, he wanted his teams to be last in the league in steals. "Why last? Because gambling for steals gets you out of position," he explains. "I wanted to give teams one tough shot, and that's it. Now we want to be first in steals -- in the country. Because the way we play now, if the other team holds the ball, we're going to be on offense 30 percent of the time and on defense 70 percent. Now who's going to control the game? But if we're going after steals, we make them play faster."

The most successful defense against the Tigers this season was USC's triangle-and-two, which helped the Trojans take Memphis to overtime on Dec. 4 before losing 62-58. "We got tentative against USC," says Calipari, who calls more set plays against zones and says he has installed countermeasures for the triangle-and-two. Besides, he adds, "if your primary defense is man but you're playing us zone, how will you be any good at it? And if you do stay in the game, what are you thinking with four minutes to go? We can't beat these guys."

“John's got just about all the pieces," says Walberg. Then again, a bad shooting night may not be enough to stop a team with perhaps five future NBA players. "Whatever you're running, you'd better have guys who can play," says Calipari. "If you forget that, you don't have to worry about being innovative."

The same could be said for Hurley's team, which includes six seniors (five of them guards) who have accepted Division I scholarships. Yet Hurley points out that talented players can always improve their skills, and he swears by Walberg's high-intensity practice drills. In fact, some coaches think Walberg's drills are his crowning achievement.

Calipari made three trips to visit Walberg in Fresno, studied his game tapes and spent hundreds of hours speaking to Walberg about his offense. These days Walberg and Calipari have a policy: They'll let coaches observe their practices; they'll send them game tapes; they'll answer questions and host clinics. But Walberg and Calipari won't give out their playbooks, and they refuse to make instructional videos. "I want to wait a few years," says Walberg, who estimates he gets more than 300 calls a year from coaches seeking info about his offense.

Walberg’s enjoying the ultimate in mainstream professional respect. The top teams in the NBA (the Celtics), college (Memphis) and high school (St. Anthony) are running his stuff, and it's spreading like a benign virus through the sport he loves.