HOUSTON
— In a 95-51 demolition of Oklahoma on Saturday night, Villanova not
only punched its ticket to the national title game but also set a
standard for Final Four blowouts. Through 78 Final Fours — dating to the
first, in 1939, which also featured the Wildcats and the Sooners — 44 points is the largest margin of victory.
That
includes games involving the U.C.L.A. teams that were part of seven
straight national championships; Bob Knight’s great Indiana teams; the
high-scoring 1991 Nevada-Las Vegas team; the Duke team that beat that
U.N.L.V. team. Whichever great college team is sepia-sketched in your
memory as historically dominant, know that it did not do what Villanova
did Saturday.
Consider
Bill Russell. Bill Bradley. Bill Walton. Many great college basketball
players not named Bill: Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Christian
Laettner, Anthony Davis. None have participated in so spectacular a
rout.
“They
made shots,” Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield said after his final college game.
“We were trying to find a way to make shots. They just played terrific
tonight.”
The
second-seeded Wildcats (34-5) indeed made shots: 11 of 18 3-point
attempts, a 61.1 percent accuracy rate, and 35 of 49 over all from the
field, or 71.4 percent. Villanova’s field-goal percentage was the second
highest in Final Four history, surpassed only by that of the 1985
Villanova team, a No. 8 seed that upset Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in
the title game.
Hield
entered Saturday’s game as the second-leading scorer and most effective
3-point shooter in Division I. In his senior year, he built on
catch-and-shoot wing play that had led to his being named the Big 12
player of the year as a junior. Hield added the ability to create shots
off the dribble, whether by driving to the hoop or by taking step-back
3-point jumpers that have drawn comparisons to Stephen Curry’s game.
But
nearly as impressive as Villanova’s offensive attack was its defensive
performance. The Wildcats held Hield to 9 points — his second-lowest
total of the season — on 4-for-12 shooting, with just one 3-pointer.
Villanova’s
frantic defense — sometimes pressing, sometimes man-to-man, sometimes
zone, always aggressive — flustered the Sooners.
Hield
seemed to receive more open looks in the second half, but he struggled
to convert them, missing all three of his 3-point attempts.
Oklahoma
(29-8) was not exactly a surprise entrant in the Final Four. It was a
No. 2 seed that had already knocked off No. 3-seeded Texas A&M and
No. 1-seeded Oregon. The Sooners had even beaten Villanova by 28 points
in December. On Saturday, with Villanova creating 17 turnovers and
holding Oklahoma 29 points under its average of 80 per game, that
earlier game felt as if from the Mesozoic Era.
Villanova
players had spent several days telling anyone who would listen that no
matter how well known the team’s four-guard, perimeter-oriented
offensive sets were, and no matter how much flashier 3-pointers and fast
breaks might be, defense was what made the Wildcats tick.
“We
don’t care too much about offense,” Mikal Bridges, a redshirt freshman,
said recently, adding: “Us stepping up on defense is just the biggest
thing. I’d rather have that than just making shots.”
After
Saturday’s game, the junior Josh Hart said: “Obviously we love when we
can hit shots. But this program is really built on just dialing in
defensively, being tough.”
Source: Nytimes.com
