GREEN LIGHT OFFENSE
Villanova’s formula for success: Not afraid to take shots
SAN ANTONIO – In the basketball ethos most of us grew up understanding, every possession results in either a good shot or a bad shot. Sometimes, the bad ones go in. Sometimes, the good ones miss. Take more good shots than bad ones, and you’ll usually get what you deserve.
But as Villanova hones in on a second national championship in three years, they’ve seemingly lopped off half of the equation. In the beautiful basketball universe Jay Wright has created, there are no bad shots, just shots — a lot of which seem to go in.
“Nah, not really,” big man Omari Spellman responded to a question about whether Villanova’s players ever get criticized for their shot selection. “They say, ‘Maybe that was a tough one; I think you can get a better one.’ But they’ll never say don’t shoot the ball. They just instill a lot of confidence in us.”
After Villanova blitzed Kansas in Saturday’s semifinals with a Final Fourrecord 18 made three-pointers in 40 attempts, it was easy to draw a straight line from Villanova’s dominance over this college basketball season to the recent run of the Golden State Warriors. Stylistically, the similarities are obvious, particularly with how Villanova can space the floor with three-point shoot- ing threats at every position, including center.
“The NBA influences all of us in college,” Wright said Sunday. “We all watch the best players, the best coaches, and see what we can learn.”
To say you want to play like the Warriors is easy. In college basketball, however, it’s not unusual to turn on a game between two high-major teams on a random Wednesday night and see one open 17-foot jumper after another clang off the rim. And even for a college team that has above-average three-point shooters, all it takes is one 5-for-30 performance in the NCAA tournament for the narrative to turn from “This is a team that embodies modern basketball!” to “Can’t live and die by the three.”
But Villanova has made it all the way to Monday’s championship game against Michigan without dying by the
three-pointer, even on a handful of occasions when it hasn’t shot them well. When they do go in, particularly at the rate they did against Kansas, the Wildcats are basically unbeatable.
To reach that level, though, requires more than just the ability to recruit and develop shooters. Lots of programs can do that. What seems to separate Villanova is Wright’s willingness to give his players total freedom offensively, empowering them to shoot and make plays without consequence or even much criticism for their shot selection.
“Coach is very willing to provide confidence for players to shoot the ball,” junior guard Phil Booth said. “He loves our aggressiveness. Maybe he’ll say, ‘Hey, that was a tough shot.’ But he’d rather you be aggressive than to be tentative out there.”
Villanova’s offensive freedom isn’t necessarily free. It’s earned by how you defend, whether you’re willing to rebound, whether your teammates trust you on the floor. But the most important thing to understand is that it’s baked into the culture of Wright’s program.
Whereas a number of successful college coaches want their players to understand what is and isn’t a good shot for their skill set, just getting on the floor at Villanova is endorsement enough of a player’s value to empower them on the offensive end.
“When you get in the most difficult situations, the last thing you want to do is second-guess yourself or be apprehensive,” assistant coach Ashley Howard said. “You want to be assertive, aggressive, confident. And those are the habits we try to instill in our guys so when you get to this moment, the most challenging situation on the biggest stage in college basketball, you just revert to your habits.”
Of all the coaching axioms in human history, none rings truer across every sport than this one: Teams will invariably take on the personality of their head coach. And with Wright, that goes all the way back to his days as a player at Bucknell when, he was, in his own words, “a handful.”
Wright took a lot of lessons from a college career in which he led the team in scoring as a junior but was forced to come off the bench as a senior. But none has had more resonance to his coaching style than this one: “If you had your shot, you take it. You take it. If you’re missing them, you kept shooting them.”
As simple as that sounds, not every college coach is built to lead that way. By nature, many of these men are control freaks, often having to restrain themselves from coaching every bounce of the basketball.
It’s also true that most college teams — the vast majority, probably — just aren’t skilled enough to play as unrestrained as Villanova, which is now at an NCAA record 459 made three-pointers and counting.
“Having great players solves a lot,” assistant coach George Halcovage said. “And we have great players and guys who can all make big shots.”
Although a 40-minute game offers no sure things, Villanova is as close as we’ve ever seen to a jump-shooting team you can count on night after night. Because it’s not just that Villanova’s players have no conscience when they go out onto the floor in front of 70,0000 people, it’s that the entire concept of a conscience never applied to begin with.