Villanova’s comeback over St. John’s shows these Wildcats still have the quality that makes them great | Mike Sielski
No matter how talented their competitors are, Jay Wright's teams always have "it," a combination of toughness and smarts that separates them from their opponents.
NEW YORK — After Brandon Slater sank the two free throws Thursday night that saved Villanova from a quick stay here in the Big East Tournament, three of his teammates escorted him off the court. Two of them had one of their arms draped over his shoulders. One had him wrapped around the waist in a hug. They were joyful after the Wildcats’ 66-65 victory over St. John’s. They were relieved. But they couldn’t have been any more relaxed than Slater had been as he stood at the foul line with 2.8 seconds left in regulation, his team down by one, a packed and fairly partisan Madison Square Garden loud around him.
A 6-foot-7 senior forward with an easy grin, Slater took the basketball when the referee handed it to him, glanced down at his toes, and drilled both shots as if he were at practice. For real. Slater, Collin Gillespie, Caleb Daniels: All of them said the same thing after Slater had broken the Johnnies’ hearts. There was no pressure. We knew he was going to make them. We work on foul shots every day in practice.
OK, but every team in college basketball -- hell, every team in high school basketball -- works on foul shots in pressure situations in practice. It’s still practice. It’s still not a game, not a Big East Tournament quarterfinal, not a situation in which one starter, Jermaine Samuels, began suffering from back spasms 10 minutes before tipoff and another, Eric Dixon, had spent most of the afternoon puking.
Yet no one who has kept even a distant eye on Jay Wright’s program over the last half-decade or so should have been surprised that Villanova wiped out a 17-point second-half deficit or that Slater was so cool in so intense a moment. That’s the level that Wright and the Wildcats have reached: You expect, or should expect, the kind of comeback they delivered Thursday. This is not the most talented roster Wright has ever had; there isn’t an NBA lottery pick anywhere in the lineup. And you expect the comeback anyway. Villanova might not win this tournament, but the same standard applies to this team that applies to pretty much all of Wright’s teams. If you’re going to beat them, you have to kill them.
Again, this is not new. Go back to Wright’s first two great teams at ‘Nova, from 2004-06, and remember the sight of the Wildcats’ starting four guards against bigger teams, of 6-foot-4 Randy Foye guarding power forwards in the post and never giving ground. Gillespie insisted that there’s no residue from those teams of the past -- none from ‘Nova’s last national-championship team, in 2018, and certainly none from those 16, 17 years ago. “Each team is different and has to develop their own identity,” he said.
So what is it? Is it Wright? He comes off always as so charismatic, and he is, but get near him when he’s on the sideline during a game, and there’s a side of him that the public rarely sees and his players learn to accept. “Take control of your f––g team!” he shouted at Gillespie during one rough second-half stretch Thursday. Is it the kids he recruits? Is it some formula he and his coaches have found to wring every drop of toughness out of their players? Because there’s a pattern here that spans a good long time, and it’s easy to see and impossible to deny.
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“It’s like a mix of everything you said,” Slater said. “We have players who are completely bought in and a coaching staff who believes in us. We take pride in that. We take pride in wanting to do something for our teammates and our coaches. We don’t take pride in doing something selfish. We’re all so unselfish that we want to do the right thing for the next guy or our coaches. We take pride in those situations in practice. We make a big deal out of them in practice. So when we get to the game situations, it feels like it’s second nature to us.”
To everybody else, too. No, this isn’t anywhere near that 2018 team, the one that won each of its six NCAA Tournament games by at least 12 points, the one that is probably the best college basketball team of the last 10 years. This isn’t the 2016 national-title team, or the 2009 Final Four team, or either of those Foye-Allan Ray-Kyle Lowry teams that came close. They’re not all that deep, and they’re a bit beat up: Gillespie and his ankle, Samuels and his back, and on.
But these Wildcats are 24-7, and they’re just like most of Wright’s teams in the most important ways. They have that intangible it. No matter what happens Friday night in the Big East semis, no matter who they draw in this year’s NCAA Tournament, no one will want to play them, and no one will be surprised if they’re still around, still playing, into the middle of this month. Just like no one was surprised, or should have been, Thursday night.
“You got a Collin Gillespie, he walks in, and he has it,” Slater said. “Jalen Brunson -- he walks in and has it. Some guys have it. Some guys, that first workout, you’ve got to learn how to develop that. Coaches are attacking that every single day and want to develop that in you.”
Did Brandon Slater have it when he walked into the Pavilion as a freshman?
“A little bit,” he said, “but Coach Wright probably won’t say that.”
He might now, after Thursday.