The always-steady Jay Wright has Villanova back in the Final Four for the third time in the last six NCAA tournaments. Will Villanova win it all again?
Despite the attention Houston paid Gillespie, his team plodded forward, same as always, just as Villanova had done in tournament victories over Delaware , Ohio State and Michigan . Doubters fairly pointed out that the Wildcats had last faced a top-20 KenPom opponent way back in December, and that opponent, Baylor, routed them by 21 points.
Wright didn’t panic at halftime. He didn’t need to. His team was ahead and had quieted the “home” crowd. His players were more experienced. Everything beyond Houston’s smothering defense was just noise anyway, and noise he was familiar with, noise he had long ago surmounted. Before the recent stretch of national title runs, Wright was known as a great coach whose teams regularly lost during the first week or the first game of the second week in the NCAA tournament.
The Wildcats lost only three more games the rest of the season, finished second in the Big East and won the conference tournament, rounding into typical March form. But they would need that same steady guidance here in San Antonio as well. The Cougars clawed their way back in the second half, behind guard Taze Moore, he of the movie script backstory, now recovered from a broken right fibula and tibia that threatened his career and cost him 634 days of basketball.
Enter Gillespie. Of course. He would say afterward that Houston had been using a “soft blitz” against him. But on this particular possession, for some reason, the defenders switched when he dribbled off a screen from Samuels. Gillespie said he wanted to throw the ball into Samuels in the post. But when the Cougars swapped who they were defending, he noticed a mismatch that resulted. “I wanted to attack it,” he said.
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