Wasn’t this supposed to be the season that Villanova finally got some competition in the Big East? Yeah, that hasn’t happened.
Instead, the Wildcats own a commanding two-game lead in the regular-season race, courtesy of a convincing 73-57 win at Xavier. Now Jay Wright has 500 career wins, Villanova has been named the presumptive NCAA tournament overall No. 1 seed and the Wildcats have a fairly good shot at going 16-2 in the Big East — for a fourth consecutive season.
When it comes to conference domination across the country, the discussion customarily starts and finishes with Kansas in the Big 12. That will happen when you win 12 league titles in a row, but we’re going to have to start carving out a space for Wright’s program in these tributes.
Look at the numbers. Since the beginning of the 2013-14 season, Nova is 59-8 in Big East play. In other words, the Wildcats are on a multiseason run in which they’re winning 88 percent of their games. That’s dominance.
Creighton might have had something to say about the conference race this season if not for the loss of Maurice Watson Jr. to a season-ending knee injury. The Bluejays were 17-1 with Watson, but they’ve gone just 4-3 without him.
Maybe a healthy and whole version of Greg McDermott’s team could have given Villanova a push. Certainly some Big East program needs to. During this current four-season run, no rival has even come within a game of the Wildcats in the conference race. That streak looks like it will continue.
Give full credit to Wright. When the Big East reconstituted itself before the 2013-14 season as a 10-team league, there were many predictions made about the new-look conference — and none of them began, “We are at the dawn of a new age of total Villanova dominance.”
In retrospect it’s easy to see now: Wright’s first-weekend exits from the NCAA tournament in 2014 and 2015 made all of the regular-season success those teams enjoyed seem suspect somehow. Maybe Villanova really was a little too perimeter-oriented to survive in March, it was said, or maybe the Big East wasn’t a “real” major conference anymore.
Then the 2016 tournament happened. The Big East received five bids (including No. 2 seeds for both Villanova and Xavier), and, oh yeah, the Wildcats fared pretty well. Kris Jenkins’ shot fell, the whispers stopped and we can enjoy Nova for what it clearly is, quite possibly the best team in the country.
Josh Hart is putting together a season that could culminate with him winning the Wooden Award, but this team doesn’t rely on the senior alone. In Saturday’s victory at Xavier, Hart scored just 11 points, yet the Wildcats cruised to an easy victory.
Jalen Brunson has inherited Ryan Arcidiacono’s spot at point guard and he has made a specialty out of getting to the rim. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be possible for a 6-foot-2 sophomore to shoot 61 percent on his 2s in major-conference competition, but Brunson has made it look easy.
That being said, the secret weapon that is rarely ever talked about with Villanova is defense. The Wildcats have limited Big East opponents to just 0.98 points per possession, easily the best mark in the league. Somehow Wright has done the unthinkable and imparted a blue-collar defensive ethos on a rotation that then turns around and shoots far more 3s than any team in the conference.
It has proved to be a potent combination, one that has put a fourth consecutive outright Big East title well within Villanova’s grasp.
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