http://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...reno-bighorns-a-basketball-experiment-too-far 140 points a game – but are the Reno Bighorns a basketball experiment too far? 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.
