Mark Armstrong’s offense is improving, but Villanova still lacks in the assist department. Here’s why.

Villanova’s loss at Marquette on Monday afternoon featured a few positive developments for the Wildcats on the offensive end on what was a pretty forgetful day of defense.

Sophomore point guard Mark Armstrong poured in a career-high 24 points. The Wildcats had their best shooting day from beyond the arc (42.4%). Brendan Hausen’s hot shooting continued.

But it also continued a trend for this Villanova team: The Wildcats made 25 shots from the field, and only 11 of them (44%) came off an assist.

Villanova (11-6, 4-2 Big East) is with Seton Hall at the bottom of the conference in assists per field goals made at 49%. Xavier leads the conference at 62.3%, and No. 1 Connecticut, which visits the Wells Fargo Center on Saturday (8 p.m., Fox) is right behind the Musketeers at 62.1%.

Villanova’s 49% mark ranked 222nd in the country as of Thursday morning.

» READ MORE: Defense fails Villanova as the Wildcats begin a tough stretch with a loss at Marquette

Armstrong might be turning the corner offensively — he has scored 14 or more points in three straight games — but he has not yet shown to be an elite passing point guard. He’s at his best creating offense for himself, taking his man off the dribble or driving to the rim, or in transition, not when he is creating for others.

That’s a description that can be applied to all of these Wildcats. Villanova is the only team in the Big East that doesn’t have a player posting at least 3.7 assists per game, and every team not named DePaul has a player averaging at least 4.

Justin Moore leads Villanova at 2.3 assists per game, Jordan Longino is at 2.1, TJ Bamba is at 2, and Armstrong is at 1.6.

This is not a new development under second-year coach Kyle Neptune. Moore led last year’s team with 3.2 assists per game, and the team assisted on just 46.7% of its makes, 286th nationally. The average ranking in that metric for Jay Wright’s last 10 teams at Villanova was 86th, which includes an outlying 227th in his last season, which ended in the Final Four.

No, Ryan Arcidiacono, Jalen Brunson, and Collin Gillespie are not walking through that door right now. The ball doesn’t whip around the way it used to on the Main Line. And the crafty playmaking of those point guards, which became a staple during Wright’s dominant run in the 2010s, is not there.

“You’ve got to work to what you get and work to what your team is,” Neptune said. “You just asked if I would like to have a Collin Gillespie or a Jalen Brunson, so let me first say the answer to that is a resounding yes, of course, we would love to have that type of guy every year.

“For some reason if you don’t have that type of guy, what are you going to say? ‘We don’t have that type of guy so we …' No, you just try to work your team and play maybe a little bit differently.

“Honestly, we’ve had to do that over the last two years. If we have to do that, we can do that. If we have a guy like that, that we can play through a little bit more, we can do that as well.”

» READ MORE: What have Villanova’s Jordan Longino and Nnanna Njoku learned from their minutes? Patience.

The lack of assists doesn’t mean Villanova isn’t sharing the ball, though, and just because the Wildcats aren’t assisting on their made baskets the way they used to doesn’t mean their offensive strategy isn’t working well enough to win games. They just need other things to go well.

The Wildcats entered Thursday ranked 37th nationally in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency metric. Among Big East teams, that was fourth behind UConn (3), Marquette (32), and St. John’s (36). Four of the teams ahead of Villanova in offensive efficiency — Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas A&M, and Wake Forest — assist on fewer makes than the Wildcats do. There are different ways to win.

Spot-up and catch-and-shoot jumpers account for 32.3% of Villanova’s offense (13th in the nation), according to Synergy metrics, and those shots come from passes.

But another big component of Villanova’s offense (16.1%) is pick-and-rolls with the ballhandler shooting. You’re not going to get assists there. The ball isn’t finding the roller and it isn’t skipping to others.

The Wildcats, according to Synergy, are also lacking in the cutting department, getting offense off cuts at a rate of 4.7%. By comparison, the nation’s assist percentage leader, Kansas, gets 12.3% of its offense from cuts.

A telling number: Villanova ranks in the 32nd percentile in the number of unguarded catch-and-shoot shots it gets off.

All of this suggests a team that shares the ball fine but relies too much on making shots, many of them contested, for a team with just average shotmakers. It’s a team that will, like many Wright teams did, live and die by its three-point shooting success and its defense.

“The makeup of our team is such that there are a lot of different guys who can make plays and not one ultimate decision-maker with the ball in his hands all the time deciding what’s going to happen,” Neptune said.

(These charts, from ShotQuality, show a Villanova team running average offense with average shot-making.)

The Wildcats continue to take a lot of three-pointers. As of Thursday morning, only 16 teams in the country were taking more than Villanova’s 28.4 three-point attempts per game. One of them is Big East foe Creighton, which assists on just 51.4% of its made field goals. Another one is Brigham Young, which is third in the nation in assist percentage at 67%.

Villanova, however, is connecting on 33.6% of its triples, good for 163rd nationally.

Armstrong made a career-high five threes on Monday at Marquette, and four of them came off assists. He was 8-for-15 from the floor overall and racked up three assists. Armstrong, a member of Wright’s last recruiting class, said nothing has really changed for him recently. He has just been “staying with the process, listening to my coaches and getting better every day, watching film,” he said.

Asked whether he expected Armstrong to become more of the prototypical floor general next season, with Moore out of the picture, Neptune didn’t want to put the guard in a box.

“I think Mark is just a basketball player,” Neptune said. “He’s a guy that can do those things, but he has a lot of other talents. He’s a great defender. He can really get to the rim. He’s really good in transition.

“Everyone gets better year to year. You grow in college basketball in dog years. You gain so much knowledge each year that you’re here. You come back every year and your game is different, your body is different, the team is different.”

That last part will always be true. Different doesn’t have to be worse. It’s just different.

“We’re still a work in progress and finding our sixth gear, where we’re running on all cylinders,” Neptune said.

Barring a change in style, however, it looks like the next gear will be reached only if the shots start falling.