City of Basketball Love

Stephen Pianovich (@SPianovich)
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Jay Wright, like many coaches across college basketball, is usually vague about his goals when he’s asked at the beginning of a season. Wright just wants his Wildcats to be playing their best basketball at the end of the season.

And as if playing in the National Championship Game wasn’t proof enough, a look at Villanova’s recent shooting success will show just how lights out the team has been lately.

Villanova has shot 50 percent or better from the floor 14 times in 39 games this season, seven of those times have happened in the Wildcats’ last 11 games. And Villanova has been somehow even better when the games have mattered the most

Villanova is shooting 48.1 percent from the floor this season – good for 19th in the country – but that mark is 58.1 in the NCAA Tournament. In fact, four of the Wildcats’ best six games in terms of shooting percentage have come in the Big Dance, where they’ve blown out four of the five opponents they’ve faced, winning NCAA Tournament games by 24.2 points per game.

So the numbers and a mostly dominant run through the Tournament – which has featured four wins so far against teams ranked in the top 25 of the season’s final AP poll – point to Villanova playing as well as it has in a long time. Wright said he thought that’s been the case with a lot of his teams in recent seasons, but none compare to this one in “terms of continuing to get better.”

“Some years, the year we lost to NC State, I thought we were playing our best. At the end of the year we just ran into a hot team and didn't make shots,” Wright said at Villanova’s media availability on Sunday. “But I do think that this team has taken advantage of the opportunity to continue to play games and has gotten better, even going into the Oklahoma game. I thought we had our best week of practice in terms of commitment to detail.

“We're going to try this one more time here (on Sunday) and see if we can spend an hour and a half in there and get a little bit better.”

Villanova’s offense really started to heat up, by the Wildcats’ standards, toward late February. The team hit 57.7 percent of its shots in an 89-79 win over Marquette, and in that game and the 10 games since, the Wildcats have hit 53.5 percent of field goals (317-for-592).

The numbers are also up from all areas of the court. Villanova is shooting 45.4 percent on 3-pointers in its last 11 games and an impressive 49.0 percent from distance in the NCAA Tournament. That mark is 35.9 percent for the season.

And from the foul line, Villanova’s 78.2 percent clip is the second-best in the nation. Even that mark is slightly up in the last 11 games (78.3 percent) and the NCAA Tournament (82.4 percent).

The biggest key to the high percentages, specifically in the NCA Tournament, has been Daniel Ochefu, Wright said.  Villanova’s senior forward and most-important post presence was injured down the stretch of the regular season and an ankle injury kept him from starting in the Big East Tournament. In the big dance, Ochefu is averaging 12 points per game on 68.4 percent shooting and has pulled in 7.4 boards per contest.

“When we didn't have Daniel, we were kind of one-dimensional,” Wright said. “He adds two things. Offensively he gives us the ability to go inside and get buckets when people are taking away our threes. Then when he gets it going, he gets people threes. …We've won a lot of games without him. But if you look at shooting percentage, he gets us easy baskets off of our defense.”

Villanova will need Ochefu to play a big part on Monday night trying to slow down North Carolina’s Brice Johnson and in getting the Wildcats those open looks they basically could not miss against Oklahoma. Villanova has proved it has become a much-improved team by beating a team it lost to by 23 earlier in the season by 44 points on Saturday.

Villanova doesn’t have any games after Monday to improve, but if the Wildcats can continue their impressive shooting trend, they may head back to Southeastern Pennsylvania with some new hardware.