David Arseneault Jr was never going to change the world. Until the Sacramento Kings hired him last October to shatter every expectation of how the NBA is played, he was a 28-year-old with half a job in the only town he ever knew.

His dream was to live as he had always lived in tiny Grinnell, Iowa coaching basketball with his father David Sr at Division III Grinnell College. There he would run his father’s outrageous, frenetic offense – long dismissed as a small school gimmick – because it was what he grew up with, what he had played and what he believed to be right. He would marry his girlfriend who also worked at Grinnell. They would share a house near campus, just like his parents. And they would be happy.

Then came a cryptic email from a Kings executive, a sudden flight to Sacramento, a meeting in the Kings offices and the strangest proposal. The Kings were conducting an experiment. An audacious experiment. An experiment never attempted by an NBA team. They wanted to see if Grinnell’s offense – with its all-out, pressing style, operated in rotating shifts of players like hockey – would work in their league. To find out, they wanted to install the offense on their NBA Development League team, the Reno Bighorns, and they needed David Jr to be the coach.

“What are the Kings doing?” Reno’s director of basketball operations, Scott Schroeder remembers thinking. “This is crazy.”

Four months later David Jr sits in a hotel lobby and laughs. Earlier in the day he had coached another game with players he never imagined seeing so close and he couldn’t help thinking how only weeks before he had been making $5,000 a year to help coach Grinell’s basketball team with his father paying him extra from his own pocket. Now he was here, one level removed from the NBA.

“I still pinch myself every once in awhile,” he says. “They had a choice of just about anybody they wanted to coach their D-League team and they came and got a Division III assistant coach who is a part-time Division III assistant coach at that. Right? That’s hilarious! That’s hilarious! They really were willing to look outside the box that’s what that’s telling you right? It’s as out of the box as rotating hockey lines in basketball games.”

If the experiment was to see if professionals could play Grinnell’s offense then it has already failed. The Reno Bighorns have become the D-League’s most entertaining team, averaging nearly 140 points and 50 three-point shots a game. One player, Brady Heslip, hit 20 three-pointers in the first two games, scoring 78 points and became a YouTube celebrity for a week. They are fast, aggressive and playing a way no one else in the D-League is playing. But they are not running Grinnell’s system. Not anymore.

Reno’s ever-changing 10-man roster has forced Arseneault to scratch the hockey-style substitutions and the full-court press. It’s tough to run shifts and a pressure defense with only 10 players especially when one of those players is a 7ft 5in, 360lbs center named Sim Bhullar who Arseneault affectionately calls “Big Sim”. There are many unique things Big Sim can do. Running a full-court press for more than half a game is not one of them.

Arseneault has had no time to change a culture. Players arrive by trade or free agent signing or are dropped from the NBA. They come to practice, spend a few confused days trying to learn a system that takes weeks to teach at Grinnell and soon disappear into the transaction cyclone that is the D-League.

In many ways Arseneault is the bigger experiment here – a nobody from a tiny school, trying to teach a crazy system to coaches and players with far better basketball resumes. He wonders if he should have thought more about how to handle professionals who have played at top college programs and even the NBA. Things have happened away from the court he cannot disclose, things that wouldn’t have happened at Grinnell with its $58,000 tuition and average ACT score of 32, things that have shocked him enough that he has stared disbelievingly at his 52-year-old assistant coach Ben McDonald and said “a player did what?” Only to have McDonald reply “Yup, I’ve seen that before.”

Every few days he asks his Kings contacts if they are happy, if they are getting what they want from him. They assure him they are. But they offer no hints on the experiment’s future. He notices they rarely say anything publicly about what’s going on with his team. His only certainty is a one-year contract with a team option for another and a lease on an apartment in Reno that the Kings have signed through April.

He might be the only person in the D-League without an agenda; an effusive man bursting with a teenage enthusiasm who wants nothing more than to please the Kings and help his players get better. If this all ends in two months and he is sent home to his “safety net” at Grinnell he will be happy for having had an adventure. It’s this demeanor that allows his assistant coaches and players to grudgingly accept an offense they don’t understand, keeping alive an experiment they never wanted anyway.

“He doesn’t have an ego,” Schroeder says. “Us personally, we love him for that.”

Arseneault glances around. A handful of his players stroll across the lobby. He waves hello. They nod in return.

Again, he laughs.

“I’m having a blast,” he says. “I’m having the time of my life. Are you kidding me?”

Even if he has no idea where this is all going.

The most essential element of the Grinnell offense – the thing that makes it hard to replicate – is desire. This is how David Sr designed it in the early 1990s, back when he was conducting an experiment of his own, seeking to inspire players more concerned about their term papers and research projects than a basketball team. Grinnell’s system has formations and principles and doctrines that serve as its framework but it only works if the players believe in its magic, throwing themselves into a screaming, arm-waving frenzy until they are careening across the court like a band of children determined to wrest the ball from their opponents’ hands.

The point is to play as fast as you can on your shift of roughly two minutes, racing to score on layups or three-pointers until the next group of five checks in, then the five after that and then you are back, lunging for steals, driving down court, shooing three-pointers for two minues more. Eventually the other team wears down. Legs get tired. Shots fall short. And desire wins.

For years, now, the Grinnell system has been winning. But it wasn’t until 2012, when guard Jack Taylor scored 138 points in a 179-104 win over Faith Baptist College that Grinnell became national news. By then the offense built to keep players interested was something real, something formidable. It even had its own mathematical formula, found by researchers at the school to be 95% accurate and explained by former player Ross Preston in a book he wrote about Grinnell’s offense called: The Road to 138.

94sh* x 33% + 32to + 25 shot differential = W

*94sh = 47x2+47x3

Translated, this means that in order to win Grinnell need to take at least 94 shots with half of those attempts being three-pointers, rebound 33% of their missed shots, force the other team to turn the ball over 32 times and take 25 more shots than their opponent.

Try explaining that to a group of D-League players who only want to know how fast they can get to the NBA.

On his first day in Reno, Arseneault stood before his new assistant coaches and talked as if he had come from the moon. He drew on a white board in a conference room, diagraming plays the other men had never imagined. That the meeting had been moved from the team’s practice courts at a local health club because the floor had been commandeered by a group of middle-aged men playing pickup basketball only made the moment more surreal.

He told them about the hockey-style substitutions. He told them their players could only take layups and three-pointers. He told them about the traps and the full-court press. He told them that many times the traps would not work and the other team would get a fast break and probably a dunk. He told them this would be fine.

Every few minutes he would stop and say: “I can’t believe your heads aren’t exploding.”

Then he told them that every time a player took a three-point shot his four team-mates would rush toward the basket in an attempt to get the rebound – a critical mistake in traditional basketball where at least two players would be backing up to protect against a fast break.

“Wait,” McDonald interrupted. “Can you say that one more time? I thought you said we were going to have four guys going to the offensive glass.”

“That’s what I said,” Arseneault replied.

Silence

“We knew it was going to be out there, but not that out there,” Schroeder says now.

When Arseneault addressed the players a few days later several laughed as he described a system with waves of substitutions, no mid-range jump shots and a goal of 50 three-point shots a game. Center David Wear looked to a team-mate and said: “Is he serious?”

“I think we were a little shocked,” Wear recalls.

“We were asking: ‘what is he talking about?’” says point guard David Stockton, the son of Hall of Fame guard John Stockton.

Slowly, the players have adapted. There have been disasters like the first preseason game, seven days after the first practice and a six-day road trip across Texas, Oklahoma and Indiana in which the Bighorns lost all four games they played. But there have been moments where Reno’s players have been faster than the other dam and the three-pointers have fallen. By last weekend’s All Star Break, the Bighorns were 14-17 and in third place in the D-League’s West Division.

As the season has gone on some players have even liked the way their own abilities have developed. Jordan Hamilton, who played four seasons with the Denver Nuggets and Houston Rockets, believes the emphasis on passing and rebounding has allowed him to show off skills he was never able to display in college or his years in the NBA.

But the problem with human experiments is that they intrude on real lives. What might be a data quest by the Sacramento Kings is a player’s only hope at a lifelong dream. Diminished to numbers on a spreadsheet the Bighorns players might be disposable but inside the locker room they are men on the brink unsure what being a basketball lab rat means for their futures.

“You can sit there and complain that you are part of an experiment and that this is your D-League year but it’s also no different than what you have to do if you get called up to the NBA and learn a team’s system right away,” Stockton says. As it happens, Stockton was called up to the Kings on a 10-day contract this week.



But many of the players fret abut the high scores of their games. Whenever an opponent scores 150 points against Reno, they get texts from friends who have seen the score asking – not always in jest – just how bad are they? Some wonder if the NBA teams are watching and wondering the same thing. Scoring a lot of points is nice but not if it means they will be stuck in the D-League forever.

“That was everybody’s big question about me [in the NBA],” Hamilton says. “They said: ‘we question your defense.’ I don’t know if that’s a polite way of saying they don’t think I can’t play defense or not.”

Either way, he hates any idea of the thought lingering in the NBA’s personnel offices.

“In the NBA everyone wants to know if you can defend your position,” Wear says.

Arseneault and Schroeder have asked NBA scouts and general managers how Reno’s players will be perceived defensively and have been assured that teams generally understand what the Bighorns are doing by gambling on steals. But that doesn’t stop the gnawing feeling among the Reno players that each opponent’s dunk after a missed steal is only destroying their own reputations. This is something Arseneault doesn’t understand.

“The guys I have here have been trained so much by other coaches that giving up a dunk is the worst thing in the world that they hang their head and we lose that split second of an advantage that we had when their guy is celebrating – and their guys are relaxed – to force it back up the floor,” he says.



“I’m not demoralized at all that’s what’s going to happen. We went for a steal and didn’t get it what did you think was going to happen? Three on–one, do you think the 6ft 9in guy’s not going to dunk it? But the guys here are so used to that being the worst thing that can happen on the basketball court that they become demoralized and they don’t realize that on the last possession we forced a turnover so we’re one-for-two right now. Giving up one point [basket] per possession and we do that for the entire game we’re going to win the game”



The other night David Jr watched a Grinnell game on his computer and he grew wistful. Early in the game one of the Grinnell players had forced a jump ball and the players went crazy, leaping off the bench, screaming across the court. Grinnell didn’t even get possession of the ball but it didn’t matter. The energy from their enthusiasm radiated from the screen.

The D-League players are not like that. They don’t celebrate jump balls. They don’t have the same Grinnell desire. It’s what troubles David Sr the most as he watches the Reno games broadcast on YouTube and realizes that Reno offense looks nothing like his.

“So much of what we do is based on emotion and that seems to be lacking,” the older Arseneault says over the phone. “Early in the season I’d see David in that situation jumping up and down and clapping his hands furiously and he’s kind of on an island. The players weren’t clapping. The assistants weren’t clapping. What we do is based on being a kid. There they are too stoic. It’s like they are saying: ‘I’m a professional.’”

It’s hard for David Sr to know what his son is doing halfway across the country. He was surprised the Kings never called him before they emailed David Jr, not that he cared if they got his opinion but more that it shrouds Sacramento’s experiment in mystery. He says he has still not spoken to anyone in the Kings front office. He wonders why they wouldn’t want to hear something from the man who invented the system they are supposedly studying.

“It’s one thing to want to experiment but are you going to experiment blindly or are you going to streamline the experiment to see what it looks like?” David Sr says.

His son doesn’t know. No one around the Bighorns seems to know. Every few days Dean Oliver the Kings director of player personnel and analytics sends them pages of statistics that detail the Bighorns performance in countless situations. David Jr reads them all, studying them for trends, looking to see what the Kings might be noticing. Oliver’s regular assessments of Reno’s players usually match those of the Reno coaches which makes the Bighorn coaches feel better about the experiment.

“In my three years in the D-League this is the most involvement from a front office that I’ve seen,” Schroeder says.

David Jr knows the Kings are serious about defying convention. The team’s owner, Vivek Ranadive, has instilled in his front office a tech culture of disruption. If nothing else, Grinnell’s system is that. Disruptive.



After half a season, Arseneault is convinced the Grinnell system can work in professional basketball, if only a team would commit fully to playing it. This means installing it months before the start of the season, drilling the coaches on the principles and teaching it for weeks to the players until they grasp it.

The thing he has noticed is that the players who do one thing exceptionally well – Wear as a shooter, Stockton as a passer – have thrived in a way they might not in a more traditional style.

“Honestly, I think it can work if you get buy-in from the players,” Schroeder says. “The offense works, it’s translatable. The drive and kick out to the shooter we do here is something they are doing in the NBA. The defense can work too but you have to get that buy-in.”

That remains the biggest question in the biggest experiment the D-League has ever seen. Can a team of NBA players, wealthy beyond their imagination, play with the same unrestrained, youthful zeal as the kids at Grinnell? This, the experiment probably can’t answer.

Still, everyone pushes on; challenging, adjusting, generating more data, working toward a purpose that will hopefully be clear.

“Just to have them feel that the decision to hire me was validated by taking some obscure thing that we do and make it work for them would be great,” David Jr says.

Which wouldn’t be a bad legacy at all for a 28-year-old, part-time assistant basketball coach who never thought he’d leave Grinnell, Iowa