VILLANOVA — It’s easy to put Villanova coach Jay Wright’s coaching career in perspective.
It’s not easy to get him to go along with it.
“It’s uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m not ... you know what? I don’t feel comfortable with it.”
So we’ll do it for him:
• Wright is the first Big 5 coach to take two teams to the Final Four since Harry Litwack at Temple in the mid-1950s.
• He’s only the third Big 5 Philly coach to take two teams to the Final Four, joining Litwack and Ken Loeffler of La Salle, also in the 1950s.
• Wright is now one of only nine NCAA Division I coaches to take his current school to the Final Four twice. The others are Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Jim Boeheim, John Calipari, Roy Williams, Rick Pitino, Bill Self and Thad Matta. Pretty good company.
• Wright is one of only nine Division I coaches to take his current team to the NCAA Tournament at least 11 times.
• Has averaged 28½ wins over the last 12 years and needs just 26 wins to become the 18th active coach with 500 wins.
• Has been to five Sweet 16s. Only seven coaches at their current school have been to more. Of those seven, only one — Williams at North Carolina — has spent less time at his current home than Wright.
• Ranks fourth all-time with 181 Big East Conference wins, trailing only Boeheim, Jim Calhoun and John Thompson.
Bring up any of that stuff and Wright just shakes his head. He doesn’t even want to hear about it.
Too distracting. Too irrelevant.
There’s a game to be played.
“I purposely don’t (think about it),” Wright said. “You guys bring up stuff, you guys help me with this. One of you (writers) told me about the two head coaches, Harry Litwack and the coach from La Salle, Ken Loeffler (who reached two Final Fours), and I wouldn’t have known that, but since you told me that it’s in my head.
“But it’s like I tell the players every season: Don’t worry about what we do, just play your butt off. You only get one chance to play. At the end of the season, we’ll sit down, we’ll talk about our accomplishments. Which we always do.
“And I hope for myself I get a chance at the end of my career to sit back and look at what we did, but I really want to enjoy every moment of it and then at the end look back, and I hope I can do that.”
Villanova, 33-5, faces Oklahoma Saturday at NRG Stadium in Houston in a national semifinal game.
A win would pit the Wildcats against the Syracuse-North Carolina winner in the title game on Monday.
Is Wright the greatest coach in Big 5 history? Is he in the top two or three? What if 'Nova wins this thing?
Wright shrugs it all off.
“I don’t really feel like we belong there yet,” he said. “If in the end someone looks back and says we’re there, it would mean the world to me. More than comparing me to anywhere national, because this is where we live. This is where we grew up. This is where we learned.
“I learned from Harry Litwack, Jimmy Lynam, Paul Westhead, Rollie [Massimino], Chuck Daly. I didn’t read any books by John Wooden. I went to their camps. Herb Magee. I went to all their camps and went to their games. I listened to what they said. I went to their clinics when I was a young coach.”
Phil Martelli, one of Wright’s fiercest rivals and closest friends, helped put Wright’s legacy in perspective after a Hawks win over Saint Louis this season at the Hagan Center.
“Here’s what everyone has missed about Jay Wright,” Martelli told CSNPhilly contributor Dave Zeitlin.
"Jay Wright has done this without pros. I had three pros on that [2003-04 Elite 8] team. And that was a national story from when the Eagles' season ended.
“We haven’t done enough as a basketball community to recognize what Jay has done. When you start talking about, ‘Well, Kansas does it this way, Arizona this way,’ (Villanova does) it without pros. Jay has done it for years without pros.
“He had a first-team All-American, Scottie Reynolds, that wasn’t a pro. That’s phenomenal. It just absolutely blows my mind how good he is at what he’s doing.”
If you want to get Wright to talk legacy, he’ll talk about his early days as a coach and how much he learned from guys like Martelli, who’s been head coach at St. Joe’s since 1995, or Herb Magee, who’s been at Philadelphia Textile (now Philadelphia University), since 1967.
And he'll talk about the Final Four. From a slightly different perspective than the one he'll have this weekend.
“When I was an assistant coach, when I was at Rochester and Drexel? I would go to the Final Four and I didn’t have any money,” Wright said. “I would go to the Final Four and sell my ticket, and I’d go in Herb Magee’s room and watch the game and listen to Herb Magee and Phil Martelli and listen to them.
“I didn’t scalp it, I sold it to someone that wanted to go to the game. But the tickets were worth like $150 or something. I needed the money. I was making $10,000 a year at Rochester, and I enjoyed sitting in the room with Herb Magee, listening to him, and Phil Martelli would be there, listening to those guys. And I would like that more than listening to the game.”