Villanova begins NCAA tournament journey grateful for big regular season

Jay Wright spent last summer thinking he would have junior guard Phil Booth, the best player on the court the night Villanova won last year's national championship, and highly regarded freshman Omari Spellman playing key roles in the Wildcats' bid to repeat.

After playing just the first three games, Booth was sidelined with a left knee injury. Spellman never played because of an NCAA ruling. Still, the Wildcats finished 31-3 and were named the No. 1 overall seed in this year's NCAA tournament.

Did Wright ever think in the preseason that his Cats would reach this lofty perch without Booth and Spellman?

"Never in a million years," the Villanova coach said Monday at the Davis Center before the Wildcats boarded a bus for the airport and their flight to Buffalo for Thursday's first-round game in the East Region.

"I'm so proud with what these guys did during the regular season. That's something that we will really value in our program. Now, we know everyone else is going to judge us by this tournament and rightfully so - that's the way it works. But we're going to value that.

"This is going to be legendary in this program, this regular season."

Even with two fewer players on the bench, and a seven-man rotation in most games, the Wildcats won their fourth straight Big East regular-season championship, and captured the conference tournament title for the second time in three years, thanks to a variety of factors.

Seniors Josh Hart, Kris Jenkins and Darryl Reynolds provided leadership and consistent play at both ends of the court. Point guard Jalen Brunson proved to be a consistent offensive threat with an ability to find the shooters in their favorite spots, and swing man Mikal Bridges did a little bit of everything.

The Wildcats' regular bench players - redshirt freshman Donte DiVincenzo and sophomore Eric Paschall - made "huge" improvements as the season progressed, according to Wright, particularly on the defensive end of the floor.

"Defense is a team-oriented concept, even more than offense," he said. "So when you break down defensively, the other team is scoring. And these guys really know what we're doing now, and they don't break down. Usually the young guys break you down, but they don't break down."

Wright laughed when it was suggested that his players earn minutes only because of their play on defense.

"You make it sound like I'm a tyrant, like, 'You'd better play defense,' " he said. "It's more that we play defense really together off one another. We play defense really connected. So when somebody just doesn't understand what we're doing, it breaks you down. That's what good offensive teams look for. They've handled it well."

Barely 24 hours after returning to campus Sunday following its Big East tournament championship in New York, Villanova's traveling party left campus around 3 p.m. to board a flight and beat the snow to Buffalo.

"After we won Saturday night, our staff already was saying, 'We're probably going to Buffalo, we're expecting snow,' " Wright said. "So we started planning then.

"The original plan was to leave at 7 o'clock [Monday night] and let the guys go to class all day. Then the NCAA [Sunday] night said that because of the weather in Buffalo, they have to get us up there earlier so it doesn't prohibit us from leaving Philly."

Wright's prior experience with snow at the NCAAs came in his first tournament appearance in 2000, also in Buffalo, while he was head coach at Hofstra.

"It was St. Patty's Day and it was a blizzard," he said. "There was so much snow and I'm thinking, 'I waited my whole life to be a head coach and make the NCAA tournament,' and it was miserable."

With its best player, Speedy Claxton, suffering a broken finger in the game, Hofstra was trounced by Oklahoma State. After the game, a New York Post reporter paid a team manager to tape Wright's postgame speech.

"I got on the plane the next morning - because we didn't charter back then - and I'm reading the New York Post and it's got my entire postgame speech," he said. "It was a horrible first experience as a head coach, and it was in Buffalo."