Dick Weiss on NCAA Tournament
BOSTON—This is arguably the best offensive team Jay Wright has ever coached at Villanova during his 17 years on the Philadelphia Main Line.
But the Big East champions proved yesterday they can win in a variety of ways,
The top-seeded Wildcats (34-4) defeated third-seed Texas Tech, 71-59, to win the NCAA East Region championship, despite shooting 33.3 percent and making only 4-of-24 three-point attempts.
Villanova, which won a national championship in 2016, survived and advance to its second Final Four three years by grabbing a season high 51 rebounds, scoring 26 points in the paint and suffocating the Big 12 Red Raiders with a physical half-court defense that limited Tech to 33 percent shooting and held them to just 14 points in the final 17 minutes of the first half when they took a 36-23 lead that held up before a crowd of 15,169 at the TD Bank Arena. Villanova got to the free throw line 35 times, as compared to 18 for Tech, which started four guards, and grabbed just 33 rebounds.
“This tournament’s crazy. Anybody can beat anybody,” Villanova junior point guard Jalen Brunson said. “The underdog, mentally, may have an advantage. But, honestly, they believe they’re good. That’s why they’re in that position. That’s also why we’re in that position. We’re a good team and we believe we can keep getting better.”
The Wildcats will have to be better than 20-for-60 when they play Midwest No. 1 seed Kansas, which beat Duke, 85-81, in overtime at Omaha yesterday, in one national semi-final at San Antonio. Eleventh seed South champion Loyola of Chicago will play West No. 3 seed Michigan in the first game of the doubleheader at the Alamo dome.
‘At this point, when you realize you’ve made it through the Final Eight and you’re going to go, you just feel so blessed,” Wright said. “You think, why us? You know, there’s a lot of great teams out there. At this point, you don’t try to figure out why. You just let it soak in.”
In Wright’s case, soak is probably the right word. As soon as Wright entered the locker room, players drenched him and his new blue suit with cold water. “I really feel chilled,” he said at the end of a half hour of post-game interviews.
If Villanova’s previous journey to the Final Four was a business trip, this one was pure youthful exuberance.
Brunson, who scored 15 points to go with the 27 he had against West Virginia in the Sweet 16, was an easy choice for Region MVP, even though he shot just 4 for 14 against the Red Raiders. The Wildcats also got double figures from four other players, including red shirt junior forward Eric Paschall, the one-time Fordham transfer who powered his way to 12 points and a career high 14 rebounds, eight of them off the offensive glass.
But this game was more of a struggle than it should have been.
The Cats, who made double digit threes during each of its first three games in this tournament, appeared comatose on offense for most of the second half and went through one 10-minute stretch in which they only scored nine points. Tech got as close as 59-53 on two free throws by guard Davide Morretti before Brunson scored on a layup and forward Paschall made a pair of free throws to give the Cats the necessary breathing room at 63-53 with 1:15 remaining.
“They’re a great defensive team, one of the best defensive teams in the country and one of the best teams we’ve played against,’’ Brunson claimed. “They did a really good job of sticking to the game plan, playing team defense. For us, if the shots aren’t falling, we try to make sure that’s not affecting us, that we’re getting stops on the defensive end. And still having confidence in ourselves that we can take shots on the offensive end
“Everyone has confidence in each other. I specifically remember that I was missing a lot of my shots and my teammates looking at me in the huddle and saying, ‘Jalen, keep shooting the ball
Keep shooting the ball. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it.’ That’s the type of confidence they have in me and we have in each other.’’
There were times this season when Villanova looked like it might not be able to make enough defensive stops to reach their ultimate destination.
The Cats won their first 13 games, but, with the exception of a game against Tennessee in the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas back in November, they were never forced to make any defensive stands. Then, they received a shock when Butler drained 15 threes during a 101-93 loss at Indianapolis at the start of the Big East season.
‘We were on a road trip,’’ Wright said. “We won at DePaul, and we played pretty good defense but when he got a lead in that game, we kind of relaxed. We won, but they made a run at us. IN the Butler game, we started the game that way, just giving up buckets and trying to outscore them
‘‘So that was kind of a slap in the face. We said at the time, we’re not going to change this overnight. It’s going to take time, you know. It’s going to be going back to the basics. It’s going to take a lot of time. The guys really did work at it, and it’s starting to pay off now at the right time.’’
