Villanova still an unfinished project as tournament time looms | Bob Ford
The Wildcats pulled out a big road win against Seton Hall, but it was crazy at the end.
NEWARK, N.J. — In the final, crazy minutes of Villanova’s 79-77 win over Seton Hall on Wednesday night, coach Jay Wright did something that can’t be found in any of the coaching manuals, and he didn’t do it because that’s what he preferred.
Clinging to a slim lead, the Wildcats were having trouble inbounding the ball. Villanova had very nearly failed to beat the five-second inbound clock on two possessions, and a real failure seemed imminent.
In a timeout huddle, Wright said that junior guard Collin Gillespie, the player typically designed to catch the inbound pass in a must-foul situation, would be the inbounder instead.
“I’ve never done that before. Never,” Wright said later. “I’ve got my best free-throw shooter bringing the ball in because otherwise we might not be able to get the ball in. It was total desperation. It was a matter of, well, we might not be able to make the free throws, but we might not get the ball in.”
A departure from what is expected has been the new normal for Villanova this season, as Gillespie and fellow junior Jermaine Samuels try to pull along a team that also starts two freshmen and a sophomore. The Wildcats are talented, and they promise to be very good soon, but the college basketball tournament season arrives even sooner and there are bound to be other moments of desperation ahead.
“We’re relying on freshmen, and we’ve always had seniors to carry the team,” Wright said. “We’re just going to ride it and enjoy it. This team can do it, but we can also lose to Providence at home. We didn’t lose games because these guys don’t know what they’re doing, or because they haven’t bought in. They’re just young and make those young, inexperienced mistakes.”
Wednesday, Gillespie did get the ball inbound when he had to. True to the frayed nature of the game’s end, Seton Hall still almost won. The Pirates raced down for a potential game-winning three-pointer on the final play, but the shot, which missed, came a half-tick after the final buzzer.
That isn’t the way the Wildcats usually close out games in which they hold a 14-point second-half lead — or a 10-point lead with 2 minutes, 28 seconds to play, for that matter — but there were a lot of un-Villanova things taking place.
There were seven missed free throws by the Wildcats in those final two minutes, including a pair by Gillespie. Seton Hall made 5 of 7 shots from the field against a defense that didn’t rotate well to the ball, making it a one-possession game down the stretch. It was wild.
All that said, the win was excellent for Villanova, which still can capture a share of the regular-season Big East title with a win over Georgetown on Saturday, if Creighton also beats Seton Hall in Omaha to force a three-way tie at the top. The Wildcats can’t get the top seed in the coming conference tournament because of tiebreakers, but getting a big road win over first-place Seton Hall was at least a confidence builder.
“We did a lot of great things, but then we had breakdowns on defense and missed free throws. I’m not upset. I’m just realistic,” Wright said. “They’re young guys and they have to go through it, and maybe we start clicking now.
"Maybe we learned something tonight, that we can get through missed shots and missed free throws and still survive. Maybe that can become part of this team’s DNA. Right now, we don’t have any DNA. We don’t have a lot of these experiences.”
The Villanova teams that won the Big East regular season five of the last six years, since the league reorganized, and won the conference tournament four of the last five years always had experience as a guide.
Two players from the junior- and senior-laden 2016 national-championship team were at Wednesday’s game, Kris Jenkins and Daniel Ochefu. Both were on the floor for the crazy ending seconds of the title game, and they know about execution in the cauldron of a tense finish.
Tuesday night, Jenkins and Ochefu were in the meeting when Wright reviewed with the team the film of this season’s first Seton Hall game, a 70-64 loss in the Wells Fargo Center. The coach methodically went over the mistakes from that game, of which there were a few. After the session, Jenkins and Ochefu approached the coach on one side of the room, cocked their heads, and rolled their eyes.
“There were some lack-of-toughness plays, and mistakes on defense, and they just came over and looked at me,” Wright said. “I apologized to them for how we played, but I said that the team isn’t disrespecting the program. We always say that you play for those who came before, but they just don’t get it yet. They’re trying. Trust me, they’re trying.”
The trying got them through against Seton Hall, but the steps get higher to climb next week in Madison Square Garden, and then higher still in the NCAA Tournament.
“We’re not going into tournament time as a finished product,” Wright said. “We’re going into it as a team that’s still growing. Do we have enough time? Do we have enough time to really be consistent, or enough time to just get hot?”
The questions hung in the air on the first light breezes of March. The winds get heavier soon and, as always, will bring with them the answers.