March 15, 2015
If I was taught to dislike anything during a life so far spent watching sports, it’s fake hustle. You know it when you see it, like Reggie Evans climbing over a teammate’s back to secure an offensive rebound or an undersized white Duke guard slapping the floor before a crucial defensive possession. “Hey, look at me! I want you to recognize how much I care!”
What bothers me the most about fake hustle is that it often forms a narrative when that player’s team is victorious. “They won the game because they wanted it more.” Or, “They were willing to sacrifice, unlike the losers who didn’t care one iota about the game’s outcome.”
The Villanova Wildcats do not do fake hustle. Even though Jay Wright lives on the Main Line and wears suits expensive enough that Gus ‘The G.O.A.T.” Johnson has recently taken to giving him the nickname “G.Q.,” one of his basketball program’s most distinct characteristics is its toughness. With the exception of a couple down seasons a few years ago, his guys have always played for keeps.
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Take the four-guard 2006 squad for example, who lost to an all-time Florida team in the Elite Eight. Last year, Wright told the Inky’s Joe Juliano about the scene following that loss, and the coach’s quote captures the all-out culture he has successfully built more times than not:
"It wasn't a bunch of guys sitting around crying," the Wildcats coach recalled a few days ago. "It was guys laying down dehydrated with IVs in their arms. They were just shot. I know it sounds sick, but I just felt so good about our guys and that they played until they had nothing left to give."
Fast forward to the current day, and ‘Nova’s toughness isn’t the primary reason it captured the Big East Tournament title on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden with a 69-52 win over Xavier. There are a bunch of factors that led to the team’s sterling 32-2 record: Excellent floor spacing set up by crisp ball movement and accurate 3-point shooting, the most talented two-way frontcourt in the conference, an eight-man rotation that is pretty much interchangeable, etc. You don’t run roughshod through the Big East without plenty of firepower.
Even with all of that talent on the court at MSG, you could see some of same exact tough plays that past Villanova players made time and again: Ryan Arcidiacono selling out and diving headfirst to back tap the basketball in transition like Dwayne Anderson did against UCLA in the 2009 NCAA Tournament; Dylan Ennis getting up in the opposing point guard’s kitchen, like Kyle Lowry did on a nightly basis; Every player on the floor sprinting over the help a teammate up that hit the deck. Intangibles can be a difficult thing to measure, but this stuff certainly isn’t nothing.
In knocking off Xavier, ‘Nova will likely secure a one seed, and perhaps as Joe Lunardi predicts, they’ll have the luxury of sitting on the top line and still being able to play close to home in Pittsburgh and Syracuse. We’ll shelve the tourney talk for once the brackets come out, though. To this program, winning the Big East is a huge deal, even if it’s clearly not the same conference of the 1980’s or even just a few years ago.
“This Big East Conference is the best basketball in America,” Wright told Johnson after the game on Fox Sports 1. “Every team we played here, we play all year, and we know how good they are.”
Even if that statement isn’t factually true, you can tell what playing in this conference means to Wright, who was an assistant under Rollie Massimino during its heyday. You can tell how much it means to him to finally be called a Big East champion, and more specifically, to bring a Big East championship back to Villanova after all these years. As Darrun Hilliard told the members of Fox Sports 1’s postgame show, “Where I come from, it’s not everyday that you see this.”
Speaking of Hilliard, there was one play late in the game that sums up the attitude Wright’s teams consistently play with. As ‘Nova led by 20 points with 1:36 left, a Xavier player slipped at midcourt and lost possession of the ball. Hilliard tried to scoop it up, but he dribbled the ball off his knee and it rolled out of bounds…. but not before Arcidiacono went hurdling to try and save it, ending up in the second row in the process. Hilliard was right behind him, and neither player was exhibiting fake hustle. It seems Wright’s players are just hardwired that way.
Chip Kelly is fond of saying that culture beats scheme, and that may be true. I’m pretty sure that culture doesn’t beat talent, but as Villanova is proving, both of those things work pretty well together in tandem.
