There wasn’t much at stake when Georgetown came to the Wells Fargo Center for the final game of the 2015-16 regular season Saturday afternoon.
Villanova decided to turn it into a party anyway.
Following the Wildcats’ 84-71 win over the Hoyas (see Instant Replay), the players and coaches celebrated the Big East regular-season championship they had clinched earlier in the week, posing on the floor with the trophy and pausing to reflect on an incredible — and sometimes, perhaps, overlooked — accomplishment.
“A great culmination of the regular season,” Villanova head coach Jay Wright said. “I couldn’t be prouder. We couldn’t be prouder of this group of guys. It’s a grind to win a regular-season championship.”
Villanova’s performance in the regular season since the new Big East was formed three years ago is nothing short of remarkable. Not only have they won all three regular-season titles, but the Wildcats have only lost six total games in those three years, boasting a 48-6 overall record. And, as Saturday’s easy win over rival Georgetown showed, they often haven’t even been challenged.
Of course, given the program’s recent NCAA Tournament failures, there’s a rising sentiment that those accomplishments mean less if they can’t back it up in March.
Don’t tell that to Wright. At least not on a day like this one.
“It’s just a special day,” the Villanova coach said. “A really nice day to finish the regular season.”
Playing a perennial rival like Georgetown is usually special anyway. This Hoyas team, however, isn’t as potent as usual with head coach John Thompson III saying this was “by far” his toughest season in his 12 years at the helm.
And the Hoyas played the part of the Big East’s eighth-place team early on, falling behind 27-6 before anyone could catch their breath. But they responded well, cutting Villanova’s lead to 11 midway through the second half to make it more of a game than some people probably had hoped.
That put a scare into the Wildcats, who may face eighth-seeded Georgetown again in the Big East tournament quarterfinals Thursday afternoon at Madison Square Garden.
“I give them credit,” Wright said. “They didn’t quit. They battled right until the end. … I really don’t want to see them again, to be honest with you. But there’s a good chance [we will].”
Thompson had similarly nice things to say about Villanova, which didn’t let Georgetown get closer to 11 as Josh Hart scored nine points in the final eight minutes of the second half to seal Villanova’s 26th victory of the season.
Hart and junior classmate Kris Jenkins were Villanova’s top scorers, pouring in 18 points and 17 points, respectively, while combining for 15 rebounds. Meanwhile, the Wildcats’ two seniors, Ryan Arcidiacono and Daniel Ochefu, combined for 26 points, 11 rebounds and nine assists before coming out to massive applause in the final minutes.
Thompson believes that kind of upperclassmen experience will make Villanova a daunting opponent for anyone this month.
“I think they’re poised to make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament,” the Georgetown coach said.
Wright, meanwhile, tried his best to deflect talk of the Big Dance. When asked if celebrating with the Big East trophy made him envision returning to the same building to cut down the nets — the NCAA Tournament East regional semifinals and finals will be held in Philly — the ’Nova coach didn’t budge.
“No, that’s not easy to envision,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t look at this stuff until after the Big East Tournament but I’m sure there’s got to be a lot of things that have to happen for us to be seeded like that. And we have to win games. We have to win a lot of games. We don’t think about that yet.”
The Wildcats, of course, will soon turn their attention to the NCAA Tournament as they look to make it out of the first weekend for the first time since 2009. But before that, they’ll focus on going to the Garden and winning their second straight conference tournament title. And even before that, they’ll take a little bit of time to soak in the staggering regular-season achievements of the program’s winningest senior class.
“This senior class is really special because this senior class came in after our 13-19 season and they really struggled through that first year to kind of restore our core values,” Wright said. “So to see them finish like this in the regular season, to see where they have the program — last night was our senior night when our seniors speak to the rest of the team and I told them this was a special class because they got this program where we want it in terms of the culture. And I know Josh and Kris and Darryl [Reynolds] will continue that because of this class.”
In the end, the class will likely be judged by how they do in this year's NCAA Tournament. That’s the nature of sports and the weight Villanova has to be bear for rising so high in the national rankings.
It doesn’t have to be a burden, though. If anything, Wright hopes his seniors and everyone else on the team remember to have fun during March Madness. Perhaps, then, they can finally exorcise some of the tournament demons that have lingered around the program over the past few years.
“To us when we evaluate our program, our evaluation process is based on what we do in the regular season,” Wright said. “So now this is just tournament time. You just gotta go out, lay it all out there and have fun with it. You want to win tournaments. We just played an 18-game tournament over 2½ months and we won that tournament. That’s the toughest tournament. But these are what you get evaluated on. We know it. But we want to have fun with this, we want to lay it out there.
“It’s exciting. It’s a lot of fun, it really it is.”
Let the fun begin.