Tim Delaney arrived at ‘Nova with Jalen Brunson, Donte DiVincenzo. After a hip replacement, he aims to play again.

Villanova brought in three players in its 2015 recruiting class. Two of them, Jalen Brunson and Donte DiVincenzo, just bullied the 76ers out of the NBA playoffs with the New York Knicks — Brunson a bona fide star and DiVincenzo a do-it-all sidekick with a sweet three-point stroke.

The third player in the class might make for a good answer to a question during the next Friends of Nova trivia night for Villanova’s boosters and NIL collective donors. Tim Delaney isn’t in the NBA. He has spent the last four years working at a few start-ups and then for Wells Fargo. While Brunson and DiVincenzo were opening their second-round series with the Knicks against the Pacers on Monday night, Delaney spent the day in sales for a trucking brokerage.

Brunson was a five-star recruit with an NBA pedigree. DiVincenzo was a four-star recruit from Wilmington who redshirted after an injury and then blossomed into a player who almost single-handedly won Villanova the 2018 NCAA championship. There are plenty of basketball-related reasons why they are playing the sport professionally and Delaney isn’t.

But Delaney, a four-star, 6-foot-8 forward who helped lead Pitman High School to a New Jersey Group 1 state title in 2014, never really had a chance. His hips wouldn’t allow for it. Sure, playing basketball at Villanova under Jay Wright gave Delaney a chance to learn a lot of things about the game and life, but unlike many of his peers, Delaney found that his aching hips made sure he couldn’t use the program as a vehicle to play the sport he loves so much after graduation.

Delaney had two hip surgeries to wipe out his freshman season with the Wildcats, who won the national title that season, and was limited to 26 total minutes as a sophomore. He then played 49 minutes the following season, which featured a third hip surgery, although he did get on the court in four of Villanova’s six games during the 2018 championship run, including as the horn sounded in the finale.

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Doctors told him his basketball-playing days were over after he was barely able to play as a senior. Continuing to play would likely cause more injury. But Delaney wanted to keep going, so he transferred to Adelphi University on Long Island in 2019 as a graduate transfer to play Division II basketball with his younger brother, Andrew.

Why risk it?

“I guess partially because I’m just stubborn,” Delaney said. “I wanted to prove people wrong. You’re telling me I can’t do something, I’m going to do it. That’s just how I’m wired.”

Those doctors … “They ended up being right,” Delaney said. “It got so bad I became a candidate for hip replacement.”

End of the athletics road? Quite the opposite. A new world has opened for Delaney 15 months after double hip replacement surgery, and, at 27, he is plotting a comeback. He’s been put in touch with a professional team in Australia and plans to try out for the G League.

Watching his former Villanova teammates hasn’t provided Delaney with any this-could-have-been-me moments, he said.

“I still think it can be me,” he said. “I just see it as a delay, like a detour.”

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A decade ago, all of this seemed pretty far away.

Delaney had a pretty standard routine after playing AAU basketball games following his junior year of high school.

“I would go in my mom’s minivan and just lay flat because I just couldn’t do anything else,” he said. “Sitting hurt. Walking hurt. I just had to be lying down with my legs straight.”

Doctors told him his hips were “shaped like straight lines instead of light bulbs,” Delaney said. That was the reason he couldn’t bring his knees to his chest. It was why his legs couldn’t move in certain ways. Doctors told Delaney that they wanted to shave his bones down a bit to help ease the pain and make things easier for him.

“I was like, ‘all right, I’m tougher than that. It’s not that bad,’” Delaney said. “I was proven wrong pretty quickly.”

Delaney had his first surgery in October as a freshman at Villanova, and another in January. It was after the third surgery, in 2018, that doctors advised Delaney that playing basketball was not wise.

Adelphi coach Dave Duke knew Delaney’s injury history when he brought him into the program. But the two were cut from the same cloth in a way. Duke’s start in college coaching came on Wright’s staff at Hofstra, and he stayed at the Long Island school for a few years after Wright’s assistant, Tom Pecora, took over. So Duke knew the proper noun that is Villanova Basketball and knew how it could benefit his team.

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While Delaney labored through 20 minutes per game with the Panthers, Duke saw the Villanova imprint.

“You just saw the positive attitude, the diving, and the taking charges,” Duke said. “It was cool for me to be able to bring in a player from a guy we both learned from and have him come right into the program and continue to do those things and show that whatever level you’re at, from the highest level of a blue blood Villanova team to a very high level of Division II, how important that is.”

Delaney was no dominant force in D-II. In those 20 minutes, he scored 4.5 points and grabbed 4.3 rebounds per game. Those hips wouldn’t allow for much. But his size and his ability to rebound were certainly useful. Duke had seen Delaney on the recruiting trail during Delaney’s high school years. This wasn’t the same player.

“You could just really see that he really wasn’t as flexible and didn’t have the range of motion,” Duke said. “He just wasn’t moving as fluidly.”

Playing at Adelphi changed everything, though. It gave Delaney, in a twisted way, a chance to give his hips so much hell that doctors had no choice but to perform a surgery usually reserved for retirees. It also gave him a relationship with Duke, whom Delaney reached out to last fall. Delaney had contacts in the basketball world, and was leaning on some of them to try to get back in the game after receiving new hips.

Not long after that, Duke got an email. There were some potential roster openings in Australia and he put Delaney in touch. Delaney said he has a chance to go to join Australia’s Big V league next year.

Life looks and feels a lot different these days for Delaney. In the two years that passed between playing at Adelphi and getting his new hips, he’d sometimes have to crawl up a staircase. Watching television sometimes meant facing a projector toward the ceiling and lying flat on the couch while icing his hips. Now? “I do yoga, maneuver my body in crazy ways,” Delaney said. He plays pickup basketball, too. “It all feels good.”

He can walk his dog for miles. He’s always been a fan of home improvements, and he recently painted his South Jersey house and helped his father build a garden.

“I forgot what it was like to not be in pain,” Delaney said. “I feel like I get to live.”

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Villanova used to do a drill Delaney said was called Score and Convert. The ball would go through the hoop and someone would be on the opposite side of the court ready to give the defending team a new ball to keep the game going. “It was like a track meet,” Delaney said. They would run the drill for 20 minutes sometimes. There were no fouls and no out-of-bounds.

“Jalen’s at the end of the 20 minutes, he’d take two dribbles over half-court and just pull it,” Delaney said. “You could see the self-confidence from the time he was a freshman.”

So none of this, not even the 41-point, put-away performance to knock his beloved Sixers out of the playoffs, is surprising to Delaney.

These two are the same Brunson and DiVincenzo he remembered — even before they arrived on Villanova’s campus together. Sure, Delaney said, maybe their skills and intelligence have improved and they’re more experienced, but the other stuff? Delaney had played against Brunson when the two were kids in New Jersey.

“He was nuts. It was crazy,” Delaney said. “He was always sprinting around on the floor with endless energy.”

And DiVincenzo … “Even during high school AAU, he always had that [hard-nosed approach]. … He was just a dog. I think everyone knows that that’s why they’re so successful.”

Villanova may have helped show them how to best use those strengths. Delaney learned a lot, too, even though he was rarely able to get on the court. He used an often-repeated phrase around the program: “Everyone has the same status, different roles.” He still wears bracelets that have two other program axioms written on them: Attitude and Humble and Hungry.

“I don’t want to compare it to the military, because it’s a different world,” Delaney said. “But [Wright] had that culture of, if someone is hurt, you never leave someone behind. No one ever left me behind. I was always on the team, I always felt like I was part of the team.”

That’s why there was no jealousy last week as he watched Josh Hart sink what was essentially the game-winner in Game 6. Delaney rattled off the “amazing” stats to show how closely he’s following, too, like Hart leading the playoffs in feet traveled on the court and, at 6-foot-4, being tied with Nikola Jokić for the playoff lead in offensive rebounds.

“I’m just happy for them,” Delaney said.

Happy, too, because basketball still remains a possibility for his future, whatever long-shot odds he might have.

“Worst thing that happens is I get another hip replacement,” Delaney joked.

“I just have fun out there and I like playing basketball and am happy to get another chance at it.”