Disastrous start dooms Villanova as its NCAA Tournament resumé takes another blow

Creighton, comfortably in the NCAA Tournament, hadn’t played since last Saturday. Villanova, uncomfortably in the nail-biting section of the tournament discussion, played a road game Wednesday and lost, and had been playing every game — all nine of them — for the last five weeks like its tournament life depended on it. Mostly because it did.

“I think our legs were fresh,” said Creighton coach Greg McDermott. “You’re playing on the road against a team that really needs a win. The pressure is probably more on them than it was on us.”

There’s a freedom that comes with being the 10th-ranked Bluejays in a game like that, and the first 10 minutes of Saturday afternoon’s game bared that reality for all to see.

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You could feel the uneasiness in the late-arriving Wells Fargo Center crowd as every Creighton three-point attempt left the hands of another open shooter in its eventual 69-67 victory. They scored the game’s first 12 points and led 32-8 midway through the first half. They made eight of their first 11 shots from three-point range, from the hands of four shooters — Trey Alexander, Baylor Scheierman, Steven Ashworth, and Mason Miller.

“They came out and really set the tone for that game,” said Villanova coach Kyle Neptune. “They made a lot of shots. They really executed and got us on our heels a little bit.

“They kicked it ahead and they just moved the ball really quickly. When you give up 30 points in [eight] minutes, it’s tough. You’re going against a set defense every single time. We couldn’t get out in transition.”

“I’d like to tell you it was a lot of great plays that we ran, but I’m not sure we ran many during that stretch,” McDermott added.

Instead, it was great offensive players making great plays against a Villanova team that lacked a sense of urgency early.

At one point McDermott looked down at his stat sheet during a timeout and saw the score was 27-5, recalling memories of the night Ethan Wragge and McDermott’s son, Doug, helped Creighton make nine straight threes and 21 on the night to whip the fourth-ranked Wildcats in the same building 10 years ago.

Unlike that night, when Creighton won by 30, these desperate Wildcats had a fight in them.

They cut a 24-point deficit to 11 at halftime. They then trailed by 14 with six minutes to play before another late flurry. Villanova, fighting for its tournament life, went almost exclusively to a two-man game with Justin Moore and Eric Dixon, who combined to score 42 of Villanova’s 67 points. The Wildcats got some late offense from Mark Armstrong, who blew by his defender on consecutive possessions to trim the deficit to two with 3 minutes, 24 seconds to play.

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Creighton (23-8, 14-6 Big East) had an answer, though, for every punch. Ryan Kalkbrenner hit a tough shot over Dixon and then later slammed home a putback dunk to bump Creighton’s lead back to three after a Moore triple cut it to one.

Villanova (17-14, 10-10) finally evened the score at 67 when Dixon was fouled by Alexander shooting a three-pointer and made all three free throws.

McDermott elected to not call a timeout. His team had the fresh legs, and he didn’t want Villanova to change its defense. Creighton got the ball into Alexander’s hands, and the junior guard hit a tough fadeaway with 0.2 seconds on the clock to silence the crowd and deliver a crushing blow to Villanova’s NCAA Tournament hopes.

“I don’t like those shots much, but I do when he takes them,” McDermott said.

Neptune said afterward that he was proud of the way his team had fought back, but it was the slow start that doomed Villanova, a problem that has popped up far too often for a team that wants to make the NCAA Tournament after missing it last year. The Wildcats fell behind when the teams met in Omaha, Neb., in December (before they came back and won), they got run off their home court early in the game against Marquette and couldn’t finish, the same problem they had a few weeks earlier when they hosted then-No. 1 Connecticut.

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Villanova has led at halftime just 15 times this season, fewer than half of its games, and five of those occurrences were in November. It takes a toll, as evidenced by how hard Saturday looked. The Wildcats never led. Maybe they would have if the game were 42 minutes and not 40.

“It’s definitely challenging,” Moore said. “It exerts a lot of energy, for sure. Trying to finish out a game, it makes it even harder because you had to fight back so hard.”

It’s the story of this Villanova season, and especially the last five weeks, having to fight for every little edge.

The loss Saturday leaves more fighting to do. Villanova will be seeded sixth at the Big East tournament and open with a game against DePaul, which is 0-20 in Big East games. A win over DePaul would send Villanova to the quarterfinals, where No. 8 and third-seeded Marquette is waiting. Marquette put up 80-plus points on Villanova twice in a season sweep. Villanova would conceivably need to beat the Golden Eagles to have a chance at an at-large NCAA Tournament bid.

There will be a lot of places to point your finger if the NIT comes calling next weekend. Saturday afternoon’s slow start, the latest of a bunch of them, is just the latest place to point.