Villanova not shy about shooting the long shot
So, Jay Wright, when did you fall in love with the three?
Funny you should ask, the Villanova coach said, his grin as wide as a threepoint line.
“The first time I shot one,” he said. Wright didn’t mean when he played at Bucknell from 1979 to 1983. The threepoint shot wasn’t fully implemented in college basketball until the 1986-87 season.
“When I played we didn’t have one, and I used to shoot them from out there anyway,” Wright said at an NCAA tournament news conference last week. “So the first time they put that line down, I didn’t care about my team. I wanted to go out and shoot some.”
Villanova junior guard Phil Booth understands the feeling. “I guess when it came along,” Booth said, “he loved it.”
Wright’s Wildcats love it, too, and they hope to shoot threes all the way to their second national championship in three seasons (Villanova, the top seed in the East Region, faces No. 5 West Virginia on Friday in Boston).
The Wildcats made 50% of their threes in the 2016 tournament and averaged 9.3 three-pointers per tourney game.
This time they made 14 of 27 threes (51.9%) in their first-round rout of Radford and 17 of 41 (41.5%) in their secondround romp over Alabama. That’s a healthy 15.5 threes per game.
Collin Gillespie, a freshman reserve guard who hit one three in each of those games, describes the simple math behind his team’s long-range philosophy. “Three is more than two,” he said with unassailable certainty.
Booth sat in front of a locker opposite Gillespie after the Alabama win. “Our motto,” Booth said, “is shoot them up and sleep in the streets.”
The translation goes something like this: Shooters have to shoot, even if they miss so much that no one will let them inside.
Booth said the idea is always be aggressive, always be ready to shoot. The ’Cats figure a missed shot is better than a turnover because they believe even if they miss this time they’ll just come back and fire away again next time and they won’t keep missing all night.
That certainly worked in the Alabama game, when the Wildcats made one of their first five from deep but kept firing away. The shoot-’em-up philosophy worked in the regular season, too. Villanova led the nation with 87.2 points per game entering the tournament. The Wildcats’ 11.3 three-pointers per game coming in was fourth in the nation.
That question about when Wright fell in love with the three was really about when he embraced it as a coach. Wright remembered losing a big man to injury during the 2005 NCAA tournament and how he decided to replace him with a guard instead of another big man as the Wildcats prepared to play North Carolina.
“So we said, OK, what are we going to do with the big guy, maybe post him up, maybe get some twos,” Wright said. “I think Carolina’s team that year had five draft choices and one of them was their sixth man. We said we’re not going inside with these guys. What’s the nextbest thing to do? Put a guard out there and shoot threes.”
The epiphany came, Wright said, midgame.
“I was, like, ‘ This is really cool,’ ” he said. “Like, we can get these kind of guys. We might not be able to get these 6-11 guys that Carolina got, but we can get these guys.”
The saying goes that live by the three, die by the three. Still, the latter happens only rarely for these 32-4 ’Cats. They lost a game to Providence in mid-February when they made three of 20 threepoint attempts.
“We’re taught to catch and shoot in any situation,” Gillespie said. “Catch and shoot first, and if they start flying at us, shot-fake and drive. That’s our motto. Catch and shoot first. If you’re open, shoot.”
The Wildcats took 22 shots from two-point distance and made eight against Alabama.
“Yeah, that’s crazy,” Booth said. “We struggled from two a little bit.”
“We’ll shoot better threes than twos sometimes,” Gillespie said. “It’s whatever works to get a win. We’re not worried about threes and twos. But if it’s there, it’s there. And we do what we do.”
What they often do is put five players on the floor who can all shoot from afar. Against Alabama, Mikal Bridges and Donte DiVincenzo hit five bombs each and Jalen Brunson added three.
“My teammates found me open,” Bridges said, “and I kept shooting.”
That’s the formula. Shoot early and often. Rinse and repeat.
Wright was asked about those 17 made threes against Alabama.
“Some nights we’re going to have them,” he said. “Some nights we’re going to have to sleep in the streets.”
Watch out, tournament field. These ’Cats are more accustomed to cutting down nets than sleeping al fresco.