PHILADELPHIA– Phil Martelli has been gone from the Philly Big 5 scene for two years, but he will always be part of the local basketball fabric.i
Martelli was the head coach at St. Joseph’s University for 24 years, winning 28 straight games in 2004 and finishing No. 1 in the AP’s final regular season poll before advancing to the Elite Eight.
Then the bottom fell out. The popular Martelli was dismissed in 2019 in a controversial move that produced backlash throughout the city and sat out for a year before joining Juwan Howard’s staff at Michigan.
He may be gone but not forgotten and will be on the bench tonight when the 11th seed Wolverines play Jay Wright’s second seeded Villanova Wildcats in an NCAA Sweet 16 game in San Antonio that is a haunting reminder of the old Holy War between the two Catholic school archrivals.
“Everybody in Philly is coming out of cars coming out of building houses asking me about Phil,” Wright said. “I was at the dry cleaners. I was starting to back out. A guy hit my window. I thought I hit somebody.”
Wright rolled down his window, expecting the worst.
“Coach, coach,” the guy said. “Tell Phil hello.”
This is the Big 5, where everyone knows each other and there are no secrets.
“He definitely knows everything about us,” Wright said. “We’ve competed against each other so many times. They’ve always had good game plans. I’m sure, what’s great about having a guy like Phil as an assistant– he knows that an assistant’s suggestions are important, but the head coach got to make the final decision. Sometimes, when you haven’t been a head coach, you don’t know that as an assistant and it can be troublesome to be the head coach.”
Michigan is looking for any edge Martelli can offer.
Wright seems destined to be the next great coach in college basketball, replacing the retiring Mike Krzyzewski of Duke.
But Martelli still has gravitas in the city where he grew up. Wright won his first of two national championships in 2016. But, that year at the annual Big 5 banquet, Martelli was awarded the Big 5 Coach of the Year after the Hawks won the Atlantic 10 tournament and advanced to the NCAA second round before losing to Oregon in a close call.
Martelli, realizing the absurdity of it all, tried to give the trophy to Wright.
“He said, ‘I’m not taking this award, and he put a piece of tape on it and said, ‘Put my name on it. And he said, ‘I can’t take this. You won the national championship.”’
Wright of course refused to take it.
The two programs have gone in opposite directions since. St. Joseph’s has only had one .500 season since. Wright has established the Cats as a perennial top 10 team and was inducted last fall into the Naismith Hall of Fame.
Martelli will get one more turn in the local spotlight against a team that smothered the Wolverines in the 2018 national title game in San Antonio.
Villanova, which won the Big East tournament, may be the favorite but the Wolverines have an edge in size with 7-1 sophomore Hunter Dickson, who is averaging 24 points in post season wins over Colorado State and Tennessee and a solid senior guard in Eli Brooks, who scored 7 of his 23 points in the final 3:50 against the Vols.
Brooks was a high- profile recruiting target of Villanova heading into his senior year in high school but chose the Wolverines instead. Villanova wound up with Collin Gillespie, a two-time Player of the Year in the Big East and a third- team All American and is the heartbeat of the Cats’ continued success along with another fifth- year senior, forward Jermaine Samuels.
Gillespie and Samuels were freshman role players on Nova’s 2018 title team. They have become leaders on this group. Gillespie scored 20 points in Nova’s 71-61 second round win over Ohio State in Pittsburgh. Samuels had 17 for an experienced team that showed no signs of panic when the Buckeyes cut a double- digit lead to 60-58 late in the game.
The 28-7 Cats have become a March team, winning 32 of their 37 NCAA games since 2016. They seem comfortable in the intense heat of competition. “I don’t think when you get to this point, you play looser, but I think when you get to this point you feel more confident in the things you do,” Wright said. “I think individually each player feels more confident in himself based on having been through two very difficult games and realizing the other players struggled in those games, because the competition and the pressure and that you have personally accomplished that.
“Then, as a team, that’s how you feel. I don’t know you feel looser, but you feel like, okay, what we do works. Let’s stick to what we do. When you start a tournament, you don’t know, hey, are the things that we did all year, are they going to work. I think that’s the difference when you get to the second weekend.”
