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Villanova rolls over Kansas to reach its second NCAA final in three years
SAN ANTONIO — After the last time Villanova lost, against Creighton in Omaha a mere 37 days ago, the team held a meeting back on campus. Coach Jay Wright and the captains, Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges and Phil Booth, opened the discussion, but eventually everyone was chiming in. The focus was simple: Play better defense.
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Practice ran for about three hours. Almost every practice after that one, for the next five weeks, lasted nearly as long, with almost every drill designed around defending.
This all might sound a bit strange, considering that Villanova turned in one of the most impressive offensive performances in the history of the semifinals of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament Saturday night, dizzying Kansas on the way to a 95-79 blowout win at the Alamodome.
The top-seeded Kentucky Wildcats (35-4) will seek their second national title in three years when they face third-seeded Michigan in the final Monday night.
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Against Kansas, they broke the Final Four record for 3-pointers made with 18, five more than the old mark, as seven players hit at least one shot from beyond the arc. They also tied the record for most 3-point attempts with 40; Villanova tried just 25 shots in the 2-point range.
The Wildcats were always confident in their ability to generate offense; they led the nation in scoring (86.6 points per game). But they realized that night in Omaha that they could never get back to the national championship game as a one-dimensional team.
“Every season has a defining moment,” the Villanova assistant coach Ashley Howard said last week. “I think that Creighton game could have been that for us.”
On Saturday, Villanova jumped out to a 19-4 lead while hitting five 3-pointers in the opening six minutes. The Wildcats entered the game six 3-pointers short of tying an NCAA Division I record for the most in a single season. They set it with 10 minutes left in the first half.
Villanova did not attempt a free throw until 8 minutes 48 seconds remained in the game.
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Eric Paschall went 10 of 11 from the field for 24 points, while Omari Spellman added 15 points and 13 rebounds, and Brunson scored 18.
Obscured a bit in the downpour of 3s was the fact that Villanova also forced 12 turnovers, took charges, blocked five shots and shook Kansas out of its game. The Wildcats limited Kansas guard Malik Newman, who entered the night averaging 24 points in the NCAA tournament, to six field goals, and held the Jayhawks to 33 percent 3-point shooting.
This was a battle between two No. 1 seeds — a surprisingly conventional culmination of a bracket full of upsets, including a No. 16 seed, University of Maryland-Baltimore County beating a No. 1 seed (Virginia) for the first time in the men’s tournament.
But the Jayhawks (31-8) and Wildcats survived the gantlet to reach the Final Four on the strength of their senior leadership and guard play.
Villanova, which beat North Carolina in the 2016 title game, rose to No. 1 in the nation in early December this season, but Wright sensed some complacency settling in. His Wildcats were undersized, and vulnerable to an off shooting night. And as Wright kept harping on defense, the players took weeks to accept that changes needed to be made.
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“It was kind of hard because we were winning,” Bridges said. “But once we took some losses, we realized.”
It was unlikely, freshman forward Dhamir Cosby-Roundtree said, that the team would have reached another national title game without that meeting in February. It was the wakeup call the Wildcats needed.
Consider them wide awake now. And looking awfully multidimensional.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
ZACH SCHONBRUN © 2018 The New York Times
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