How Jay Wright Molded Like-Minded Point Guards to Turn Villanova Into a Blueblood

Character evaluation, player development and a never-ending commitment to playing perfect basketball helped build a powerhouse program centered around one position.

Those who know, who understand the most important position at the most successful men’s basketball program in recent NCAA history, return to the same phrases. Leader … tough … versatile … resilient … floor general … heart … competitive. They tend to fall back on cliches because what they’re trying to explain is obvious and difficult to describe beyond the obvious part. They’re trying to explain what it means to play guard at Villanova, perhaps the single position that’s most synonymous with the ethos of a modern college basketball power, a job title that doubles as a window into a program’s soul.

Think Villanova men’s basketball and, chances are, “guards” comes next. Think national championships won by Villanova and many pivotal players shared the same position. In 2016: Josh Hart, Ryan Arcidiacono, Jalen Brunson. In 2018: Brunson, Donte DiVincenzo, Phil Booth.

These weren’t the first guards to lift Villanova toward the pinnacle of shining moments. But they were the ones who elevated the Wildcats to bluest-blood status in recent years. The ones who, says former player and assistant coach Baker Dunleavy (now the head coach at Quinnipiac), “have the same personality, the same demeanor; they’re stoic, in a way, and ready to rip your heart out.”

That association, of a program and the position that defines it, led Hart to Villanova in the first place. In some ways, Jay Wright reminded him of John Thompson. Both coached in the bruising Big East, at basketball schools—Villanova for Wright, Georgetown for Thompson—and both not only built elite programs but built elite programs with one position as the centerpiece. For Thompson, it was centers; for Wright, guards; specifically at the point. What’s funny, Hart says, is how both coaches wanted the same thing from different places. “Just tough motherf-----s. That’s the pedigree. That’s why they call us Guard U.”

One Wright mentor, Miami’s Jim Larrañaga, watches the Wildcats and sees that soul, which, at its most basic level, is of a point guard. The imprint, he says, is what makes Wright more than a good coach. Season after season, game after game, his guards bully into the paint, drawing fouls or kicking out for open jumpers; they’re adaptable, versatile, consistent and fundamentally sound; they can shoot, drive, pass and rebound. When Larrañaga watches Villanova’s current crop, he sees “carbon copies,” which he describes as “amazing, because they always look very, very similar to how they looked the year before.”

That’s the tapestry of Villanova basketball. One stitched from Randy Foye and Allan Ray and Mike Nardi to everyone who followed; tradition passed from Kyle Lowry to Scottie Reynolds to Corey Fisher, Maalik Wayns and Darren Hilliard; to those who won Wright titles; to the latest in the grand lineage, like Collin Gillespie to Justin Moore. That’s what Larrañaga sees. Same offense. Same defense. Same execution. Same confidence. “It’s actually a very simple brand of basketball,” he says. “But it works, every day and every year.”

To understand how Villanova is making another push for another national title—its third in the last six postseasons—start there. Not with the Big East player of the year honors, the hundreds of games won, the overwhelmed trophy case, or the All-American nods for future NBA draft picks. Playing guard at Villanova is more than that, worthy of italics, and it’s the tradition that matters above all, not what the tradition yields.

Case in point: When the Wildcats clash with the Kansas Jayhawks on Saturday night in the first national semifinal, they will do so without Moore, who tore his right Achilles against Houston in the Elite Eight. And yet, as Villanova prepared for a game few think it will win, Wright leaned on veterans like Gillespie to deliver the same message Larrañaga sees on court.

At Villanova, nothing changes. That’s the gist.

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How Villanova became Guard U is a story of intention, tradition and the good fortune produced by both. It starts, of course, with a point guard, the product of Churchville, Pa., an unremarkable Bucknell Bison whose best season was 1981–82. That year, a young Wright averaged 11.9 points and 2.9 assists. He was never the fastest, smoothest, or most coordinated guard on his own team. But he recognized the value inherent in his position. It extended beyond measurables and spread all over the court. Like his future guards, Wright overcame his own athletic limitations. He sank jumpers and led teams. When his minutes dropped in his final season, he saw his future, how everything connected, and not just the profession (coaching) but how he would build teams, in his own image—to a point.

Hart would like to correct that record. Yes, his beloved coach also played guard at the college level. But the tradition Wright started upon leaving Hofstra for Villanova in 2001 is made from, shall we say, far better stock. “I mean, I would have f----d him up,” Hart says, before he starts laughing uncontrollably. “Put that in there. No chance, Coach. No chance.”

That’s exactly what Wright would want a Villanova guard to say. That’s their collective mindset, what tethers players of different ages, sizes and abilities to the same place. Players like Randy Foye, a Newark native who embodied what Wright wanted to elevate a once-proud program back to where to it belonged.

When Wright took over for Steve Lappas, the Wildcats had not won a single NCAA tournament game in four seasons. In those same four seasons, they had made all of one appearance in the Big Dance. Enter Foye, the prototype for the tradition Wright did not yet know he would create.

Foye hated practices at first. It wasn’t the intensity—he loved how sessions were “lit, passionate, everyone screaming, controlled chaos.” It was how Wright wanted his guards to play, a mixture of drives and pivots and jump stops, the tasks technical and bruising. Foye says the guards fought back, asking for more creative allowances. But something unexpected happened: The more they bought into Wright’s way, the easier it was to see that … it worked. “Maybe we should listen,” Foye told his teammates.

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In 2004–05, Villanova made the tournament, advancing to the Sweet 16 behind a bevy of guards who shared Foye’s mindset. Like Ray, Lowry and Nardi. This group of perimeter players changed everything, including, some would argue, basketball itself. They had developed together, by challenging each other in a basketball incubator that was equal parts nurturing and savage. When the Wildcats lost forward Curtis Sumpter to a knee injury the next season, Wright looked at his roster and saw that … most of his best players happened to play guard.

Wright did the only thing that seemed to make sense. He plugged four guards into the starting lineup. That meant adjusting how Villanova played, with more frequent switching on defense and hard hedges on pick-and-rolls. That meant more ball movement on offense, passes zipped all over the court. The move was downright Belichick-ian. It wasn’t about creating a system and plugging players into that system, at the cost of their individual talents. It was about molding the system to the strengths of the roster, injuries and all.

“Jay’s great separator is he doesn’t really care what anybody thinks,” says Billy Lange, a two-time assistant at Villanova and now the head coach at St. Joseph’s. “Every decision he makes is for the comfort of the people who have trusted him to coach them. Consistently making personnel his driving factor has been the staple.”

Those who lived through that Sumpter-less season can draw a tidy parallel to now, with Moore out. Like Nardi, the guard who’s now an assistant coach on Wright’s staff. “People doubted [the four-guard offense], or wondered, is it gonna work?” he says. “They tried to bully us and punk us. That’s where our mentality came in.” He leaves the tie with the present unsaid, but it’s not lost on any of them. That team, minus a key player, featuring all those guards, advanced to the Elite Eight.

As another Final Four approached, Wright ended every catch-up call with Foye the same way. “Never forget you built this,” the coach told him. “Always remember, because it was a lot of blind faith.”

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So began an evolution, the marriage of coach who understood the significance of guard play and the guards who came to understand him. After Foye graduated, whenever he watched his alma mater, he saw the same symbiosis between head coach and star guard that he once felt. That’s what impressed him most about Wright, the consistency in approach. He wasn’t afraid to deploy a “radical” offense when necessary. But the tenets of Villanova basketball were just that.

The Wildcats returned to the Final Four in 2009, in part because Wright schooled his assistants on specifics. What to look for. What he wanted. Which was: competitive players, with dynamic personalities and high basketball acumens. Loved to ball. Never quit. He went after recruits from the Northeast, for the grit they often showcased, and he could seem to care more about makeup than measurables, at least early on. Wright based his reasoning in simple but important notions. Most college guards could shoot, right? But how did they impact games when shots didn’t fall? Did their body language change? Their energy? Their habits?

Wright’s approach birthed an unintended consequence that can seem like mere coincidence in hindsight: From 2009 to 2016, his team made five NCAA appearances in six seasons but never advanced past the third round. Thus began the chorus that clung to him; largely unfairly: leader of good teams, not great ones; tough and gritty but not in March.

To upend the narrative, Wright says he changed … almost nothing. He didn’t see his approach, or his players, as the issue. Former assistants describe some changes, mild mostly, like the added emphasis he placed on shot selection and decision making for the guards the team brought in. That position would continue to drive Villanova basketball, then, now and forever. Wright wanted underdogs, players who didn’t mind developing, who weren’t afraid of how uncomfortable that development might be. If they were tough, and they worked hard, and they were smart, eventually, he figured, the Wildcats would win.

It was Wright’s job, along with his assistants, to add dimensions to their games. It was their job, the players, to pass along traditions that were not easily defined. “It eventually becomes unspoken,” Lange says. “Like, just turn on the television, and it’s clear who they are, what they do. There’s a heavy burden there, but it’s one the right kind of player embraces.”

As another local fixture on the Philly basketball scene, Phil Martelli, watched Wright build Villanova into mighty Villanova, Martelli saw beyond the notion that Wright sought elite point guards. Every coach does that, on some level. To Martelli, it was how Wright coached his point guards; he wasn’t plucking five-star recruits and throwing them the ball. He turned them into leaders, pillars, and each helped him make progress with the next. Martelli finds the approach almost regal and very Wright. “I can’t describe it,” he says. “It’s just … it’s pristine. There’s a dignity to Villanova basketball, to that campus. Like, if only those buildings could speak, they’d describe a place that’s impeccable.” He extends that image to the basketball coach. Villanova players jump stop. They switch on defense. They shot fake. They don’t beat themselves. “Impeccable basketball,” Martelli says. “There are very few marriages where the coach and institution are in perfect alignment. That’s one.”

Wright continued to evolve. Arcidiacono stood out for his ability to post up other guards, and Wright took that trait and made it a program staple. Arcidiacono imparted what he learned to Brunson, who elevated the Wildcats new guards-who-destroy-inside twist. Assistants looked for prospects who fit that mold, added post-up drills to practice and considered using a small forward like Kris Jenkins at center.

That’s Wright’s genius, Lange says. When he didn’t want or need to waver, like when Arcidiacono had eight turnovers in one game his freshman season, Wright didn’t overreact. He didn’t make changes for the sake of making changes. When his program was tabbed as a perennial pretender, he didn’t change much at all. But when he could adjust, when he needed to, he did. Like with Syracuse’s 2–3 zone defense, the guards who posted up confused opponents who rarely saw that scheme. Wright shifted Daniel Ochefu, a slick, 6-11 forward, to the top of the key, hoping that taller defenders would follow him outside, which gave Arcidiacono space to operate and spread the floor for open shooters.

The foundation, built on guard play and Ford-tough guards, led to those national titles, which Villanova won in 2016 and ’18. No disrespect to the founding members of Guard U, but the success they had and the tradition they built ultimately netted better players who oozed the same vibe, the whole improved by schematic tweaks. Hart admits that it might sound cheesy, but he felt the weight of the program’s family ethos, the responsibility to prepare the next guards to take over when he graduated. “Took that as seriously as I take anything,” he says.

When Foye watched Hart or Brunson or Gillespie, even in warm-ups, he saw the moves, the same soundness. He saw himself and, he says, “the brotherhood.” The Villanova teams that won national titles were replicas of those that didn’t make it out of the first week. The difference, what tipped it, was talent and cohesion. The soul remained unchanged.

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All of that forms the baseline for one hell of a love story: How a guard became a coach and transformed into a true basketball blueblood, through guards, which is to say through himself. Consider Villanova on par with the Dukes, the Kentuckys, the North Carolinas and their next opponent: the Kansas Jayhawks. “It’s just different at Villanova,” Dunleavy says. “Different than Kansas. Different than Duke. It’s so tight-knit and so many of the stars live near there. As you go through life, it’s the place you keep coming back to.”

Basketball eventually caught up to Villanova’s modifications from 2006. Small ball, positionless players, guard-heavy lineups—Wright didn’t invent any of those concepts. But he certainty played a role in their ubiquity. “Ahead of his time, no doubt,” Hart says.

As other programs started to recruit typical Villanova cornerstones, the program’s familiarity with exactly what it wanted and exactly who fit best made for a competitive advantage. Larrañaga admits that his staff, like most staffs in college basketball, didn’t see Gillespie as a Division I talent. But Ashley Howard, then a Wildcats assistant, saw a cornerstone the first time he watched Gillespie play in person. He knew what to look for. That was the difference.

Gillespie is now a two-time conference player of the year, and that speaks to Villanova’s culture, from the coach (Howard) who pushed for Gillespie’s scholarship to the mentor (Brunson) who kicked Gillespie’s ass in practice to the DNA passed from Foye all the way to now. Howard can still recall spying Gillespie, after he broke his left hand in his freshman season, practicing jumpers only with his right. That’s the Villanova guard, embodied in one image.

In fact, when Caleb Daniels transferred in from Tulane in 2019, Gillespie began the indoctrination on Daniels’s initial visit. He challenged Daniels to a game of one-on-one, fell behind 13–0 and didn’t miss again en route to a victory that meant little but said a lot. At Daniels’s first practice, the guards split into groups of three for a post drill. Daniels was guarding Gillespie, and despite a warning from another teammate to not bite on a shot fake, Daniels did not listen. He bit, rising from the proper defensive stance as Gillespie bent lower, before leaping and hitting Daniels’s rib cage as he scored. “I’m literally wheezing,” Daniels says. “Like, wow, this is Villanova basketball at its finest.”

Exactly. That’s the point. “Each team is a little different,” Brunson says. “But the same qualities are still there.”

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Even then, this season didn’t look much like the other recent seasons, when Villanova would contend for championships, including the national one. Nardi, the guard-turned-assistant, chalks some of that up to players like Gillespie who were recovering from injuries, the global pandemic and a higher level of uncertainty overall. But after back-to-back losses to Baylor and Creighton in mid-December, Wright relaxed the reins, allowing his super seniors, Gillespie and Jermaine Samuels, to lead the resurgence that led to here. Their message: Nothing changes. What else?

Few of the sober minded give Villanova much of a chance against Kansas, especially after Moore’s injury from last weekend. But those who do think the Wildcats can win are closest to the program, its culture and its guard lineage, and while their belief might seem like and be tinged by bias, it’s mostly grounded in experience; the everything, from then to now. “What’s remarkable,” Martelli says, “is this year he’s doing it without pros.”

“He” is Wright, and while Gillespie and Samuels could both make an NBA roster, Martelli is not wrong. In fact, this Villanova team, its lack of depth and absence of superstars, only bolsters the argument many who are close to the coach have already made. “Jay Wright is the best coach in college basketball,” Foye says.

Not everyone would agree with that sentiment, and Wright, for one, would prefer no one said that about him. But it lingers, especially in the final season of Mike Krzyzewski, with Dean Smith retired and Jim Boeheim near the end. Hart would like to clarify once more here. There are other coaches in college hoops, he says, who recruit better, landing more talented players every season. But this (hypothetical) debate isn’t just about recruiting. “No knock on those guys, but he beats them,” Hart says.

What’s endearing about Wright is how he treats his fellow coaches, like Chris Holtmann of Ohio State. When the Wildcats knocked the Buckeyes out of this tournament in the Sweet 16, Wright sent Holtmann a thesis-length text message, laying out, with bullet points, his early losses in the tournament, and imploring Holtmann to remain, at his core, himself.

“When we look back in 25 years, we’re going to see one of the most remarkable runs ever in college basketball,” Holtmann says. “Maybe not the same number of championships as John Wooden. But, man, what a run. It’s ridiculous.”

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In New Orleans, Wright all but blushed at the comparison to other bluebloods. He said that Villanova never aspired to be them, even fought the urge to try, because the circumstances are not the same. But that’s the thing: Villanova is a blueblood, one guided by guards to the pinnacle of college basketball, season after season, game after game.

When Krzyzewski retires, Wright will become the only active coach with two national titles. Or three, if he wins another one next week. He has already turned down overtures from Kentucky, UCLA and North Carolina. He’s 20–3 in the last six NCAA tournaments. His rotation might be small, in number of players and their size. But his accomplishments are not.

That’s the beauty of it. Kansas has length and talent and the kind of guards that Villanova always coveted. The Jayhawks are also not missing one of their best players. But no chance? Come on!

Should Villanova shock the sports world on Saturday, a win portends another win on Monday night. In both of Wright’s title runs, the Wildcats topped the Jayhawks en route to a championship. It’s funny, Lange says, because before Villanova’s rise started, this is exactly what the coaches discussed whenever they started dreaming. Not conference titles, or NCAA bids, or first-round draft picks. Not even national championships. They wanted, more than anything, to build a “national program.”

And, now that Villanova is one, according to every reasonable metric, there was Wright, on the eve of another Final Four appearance, texting Foye. The coach had noticed the guard who started the tradition that now defines his program was not on the list of players headed in for another title push. Foye graduated from Villanova 16 years ago, but his place in program history has not been forgotten. Nothing changes, right?