#23 Louisville: 11-3 (2-0 BE)
#18 Villanova: 13-3 (1-2 BE)
Next game: vs. St. John's, 18 Jan. at the Pavilion.A dangerous but inconsistent Louisville team came into the Wachovia Center Saturday and shot colder than the swirling snow and sleet blanketing Philadelphia outside. The Cardinals were an astounding 24 for 62 from the field, and it was almost as bad from the foul line, where Louisville managed to make just 10 of 17 attempts, or 58.8 percent. But it gets better. The Cards shot an absurd 3 of 25 from the three-point line -- 12 percent! This includes making a magnificently awful 1-of-11 threes in the second half.
With numbers like that, it's safe to assume Villanova won by 20, right?
Wrong. No matter how easy the task, no matter how clear his path, no matter the inherent advantage of facing a team shooting NINE PERCENT from the three in the second period, Jay Wright and his stubborn, petty, ham-handed, and reactionary brand of coaching will find a way not to win.
Not that Villanova's one-point loss was an unfortunate turn of events, its late-game collapse an undeserving denouement of a masterly duel between two Hall of Fame coaches. Many -- most -- of Louisville's missed shots were open looks. Had Pitino's Cardinals shot even a reasonably below-average percentage from the three or field, Villanova would have lost by double digits.
What may be forgotten in the aftermath of the Wildcats' blown endgame chances was how many times Louisville could have put Villanova away for good. Had Wright and Villanova not been bailed out continually throughout the game by the herculean efforts of
Scottie Reynolds and Dante Cunningham, Louisville wouldn't have ever had a chance to lose, even with its once-in-a-decade bad shooting performance.
Where did it go wrong? After all, it takes a special effort to lose to a team that misses 22 three-point shots. First things first. In what can only be attributed to ill preparation, Villanova once again quickly fell behind at the start of the game. To say this is a trend is an understatement; against any reasonable opposition, Villanova's slow starts out of the locker room in the Wright era are more like iron-clad scientific law.
At the start of this game, Louisville jumped out to a 6-0 margin, and eventually led by 11 in the first 10 minutes of the game. How did that happen, considering the Cards shot less than 39 percent in the half?
Villanova managed to turn the ball over 4 times in the game's first 5 minutes, as the Wildcats instantly withered under the stress of Louisville's press. When the 'Cats didn't turn the ball over, they took rushed, pressured shots, unable to get into play what few offensive sets they prepared.
But could anyone have predicted that the Cards would have pressed to begin the game? It's not as if Rick Pitino is world-famous for his full-court pressure defense, his very name synonymous with the press. Give Wright a pass on this one; it would have blindsided anyone.
OK, so Pitino shocked the world and opened with the press. Surely, after calling a timeout when down 0-6, Wright would make the proper adjustments and focus on improved ballhandling to break the Cards' press.
Wright, of course, had other plans, benching Dwayne Anderson and the point guard Corey Fisher for Reggie Redding and Shane Clark, whose respective ballhandling skills can only be described as worse and worser. Before long, the 'Cats were down by double-digits.
Let's make a quick jump ahead to the game's closing minutes. Amidst a furious Villanova comeback, Wright played a game of chicken with the clock, holding an exhausted and limping Scottie Reynolds on the bench for as long as prudently possible -- actually, far longer -- in a move that befuddled even the game's television announcers. Why would Reynolds, a highly conditioned athlete coming off several days' rest to play this home game, need to catch his breath in a crucial moment like this?
Maybe it's because Jay Wright thought it would be a good idea to leave Reynolds out there for much of the first half as the sole Wildcat ballhander against a Louisville press that is annually regarded as among the most intense in the nation. Reynolds's exhaustion was the direct result of having to break Louisville's press often with no help whatsoever in the backcourt.
It's almost like bizzaro basketball. A team jumps out to a quick lead thanks to its smothering press, and the opposing coach reacts by subbing out his best ballhandler (Fisher) for a human turnover machine (Clark), leaving just one guard against five pressers. This would not play in CYO basketball.
Wright's substitutions were pretty much the exact opposite of the proper coaching move, and while that has a certain appealing irony considering Wright's seven-figure coaching income, it won't be of much consolation to a team now facing an uphill battle to .500 in conference play and an NCAA tournament berth.
The rest of the game was filled with other coaching atrocities, not the least of which the continual reactionary yanking of Corey Fisher if the sophomore so much as looked at Wright wrong. After witnessing Fisher's emergence, which was precisely caused by Corey's increased confidence, Wright was forced to insert Fisher into the starting lineup.
Fisher, you may remember, was Villanova's top recruit two years ago, and started several games last season. So all of a sudden, according to Wright, Fisher was not good enough to start at the beginning of this season, until he was. Brilliant.
After Fisher scored 20-plus points in consecutive games, even Wright could not justify keeping him on the bench at the opening tip. It's like player-evaluation by random lot; like choosing your bet on the craps table by which number came up last.
But even starting Fisher hasn't stopped Wright from yanking him from the game almost arbitrarily. Fisher played just 18 minutes Saturday against a Louisville team that places the aerobic harassment of opposing guards at the core of its basketball philosophy. Jumping at the chance to bench Fisher at first opportunity, Wright used Fisher's cold shooting start against Seton Hall as his apparent justification for playing him just 16 minutes in that game.
The mistake of leaving Fisher on the bench for most of the Louisville game, causing Scottie Reynolds to literally limp from exhaustion and the Cardinal press, was alone enough to cost Villanova the game.
Another decision that left many Villanovans screaming at their television sets, and sending angry text messages to this Web site, was Wright's reliance on Shane Clark and Dwayne Anderson for a combined 34 minutes. During that time, Clark and Anderson collectively shot 1-7 from the field, and combined for just 1 assist, even though both were playing on the wing.
A crucial part of breaking a strong press like Louisville's is exploiting it via the center court and getting easy buckets as a result. These are areas where, typically, a team's shooting guard or wing will excel, and it should go without saying that Clark and Anderson have never fit that description.
How about a ridiculous 24 minutes for big guard Reggie Redding, while Corey Fisher languished on the bench? (And Malcolm Grant sunned himself on South Beach, and Bilal Benn enjoyed breathtaking views of Niagara Falls.) Redding was held scoreless, shooting 0-3 from the field and missing a huge front-end of a 1-and-1 at the foul line. Redding did manage to turn the ball over 3 times, but, hey, he does bring "size" over smaller, better players like Fisher.
How about just 21 minutes for Corey Stokes, fewer than Redding and equal to Anderson. Stokes is not known for his dribbling, but can handle the ball well, and did handle the ball competently against the Cardinal press, notching 2 assists and 0 turnovers. And it's no coincidence that Villanova's slow comeback at the end of the second half came when Wright finally subbed in Stokes.
How about the simple observation that every move made by Wright seems to be reactionary, slow-witted, and wrong? How about in the modern power-conference milieu, an ever-escalating arms race of preparation, Wright's team show almost zero signs of any prophylactic strategy?
How about the idea that even Pena's legendary choke job at the foul line, and Reggie Redding's inability to put in an open follow-up, were both rendered meaningless by Wright's terrible coaching the 39 minutes prior?
Or perhaps that's wrong. Maybe Pena's free-throw woes and the two missed layups at game's end were infused with meaning solely because Wright could not out-coach a team shooting 12 percent from the three. Had the game gone at all reasonably before the last minute, Pena's missed free throws might not have meant anything at all.
And don't even get me started about leaving in for the game's closing possessions a player who'd missed 3 of his last 4 free throws, 6 of 12 overall at that point.
I could make more points and belabor this issue all day, but this post is already longer than I'd planned. The bottom line is that Wright is by all descriptions a very nice man, and a good recruiter. But he is tremendously bad in the trenches of a close game.
And it's not even one thing. His overarching strategy and philosophy are bad. ("Take-'em offense," anyone?) His preparation is lacking. His ability to react and adjust in real-time is nonexistent. Perhaps most frustrating, though, are the substitution patterns, which at best are baffling, and at worst cost the team wins.
Wright cost his team this game, managing to get outcoached by Rick Pitino even when Pitino's players couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
And make no mistake: Wright will cost the team more games before the season ends, an ending that is increasingly likely to be in the NIT.
Congratulations to an anonymous reader for
most closely predicting the game's final score.
The Wildcats have a weeklong layoff until a home game with St. John's on Saturday.
On to the player grades. "READ MORE" below for player performance grades and analysis.
