In mid-November, Villanova was 2-3 and it felt like the Kyle Neptune era might be the Wildcats’ equivalent of the Craig Esherick era at Georgetown.
You probably do not remember that name, but Esherick was the longtime assistant for John Thompson at Georgetown who took over for Big John midway through the 1999 season when Thompson resigned. Esherick held on to the job for five more seasons, and Georgetown slipped into mediocrity. Esherick made one Sweet 16, in his second full season as head coach, but in hindsight, it was one of those ill-fated in-the-family hires in which a basketball program has a strong brand and feels like it needs to hire one of its own to keep it going, only to have it all go wrong.
Some of these hires fail miserably (Kenny Payne at Louisville); others are slower descents, with some just-good-enough seasons to not jump ship right away and maintain a let’s-see-where-this-goes attitude within the administration.
Neptune, to date, had been the latter. He spent eight years as Jay Wright’s assistant at Villanova, including the 2016 and 2018 national championship runs, before becoming a head coach at Fordham for one season and then getting the call to replace Wright when he surprisingly retired three years ago. And Neptune’s Wildcats tried to play like Wright’s Wildcats. The pacing, the spacing — it was what we’d come to know as Villanova basketball. The results weren’t, but they also weren’t Payne-at-Louisville bad: two mediocre seasons to start, with .500 finishes in Big East play each year. But this third season got off to a worrisome start, with losses to Columbia, Saint Joseph’s and a Tony Bennett-less Virginia.
Villanova responded by blowing out Penn, then losing by one on a neutral court to Maryland, and at that point it was easy to write off Neptune as another in-the-family mistake. Wake us up when Villanova tries something else.
Well, Neptune and his Wildcats might just be ruining the convenient narrative. Villanova knocked off No. 9 Connecticut 68-66 on Wednesday night, has now won eight of nine games and sits in a three-way tie for second place in the Big East.
The Wildcats needed a little fortune to hold on Wednesday, as UConn star Alex Karaban missed two free throws with 3.1 seconds left and the Huskies trailing by one. It’s always dangerous to play official from the couch, but it looked like a ball-don’t-lie situation, as Jordan Longino’s defense of Karaban’s final drive looked unworthy of the foul call.
“Whatever the ref calls is what it is,” Neptune told The Athletic after what was arguably the most significant win of his career to date.
He seemed almost unfazed by the result, a very process-oriented perspective that has probably helped make this turnaround possible.
“We just got to keep getting better,” Neptune said. “We got to focus on our next thing. There’s no anointing or anything like that. We’re barely even halfway through the season. We have to continue to get better, continue to push our guys. Our guys got to hold themselves and each other accountable in trying to get better as a unit each day and see where we are at the end. Just to start thinking about anything else other than that is not what we want to do.”
Neptune deserves credit for not letting a sky-is-falling mentality take over, because that would have been easy. This offseason, after the Wildcats’ offense struggled last year, he tried to lean into recruiting players who could help fix that. He felt pretty good about his offense this preseason, but the problem was his players did, too. He admits there was sort of a belief that the offense was so good that the Wildcats could just outscore the opponents they faced early on who didn’t have the name recognition.
“It’s human nature when guys are scoring, you kind of feel good about yourself,” Neptune said. “There aren’t any good teams that don’t defend at a high level. As a coach sometimes, you can say it as much as you want, but when you know guys are scoring and the team is scoring well and not getting results, I think (then) the players take notice.”
The Wildcats haven’t turned into a defensive juggernaut, but they’ve been respectable. Over the first five games, the defense ranked 312th out of 364 Division I teams, but since then, the Wildcats have been the 19th-best team in the country with the second-best offense and the 167th-best defense, per barttorvik.com. And in Big East play, Villanova has the best offense and fourth-best defense. Respectable on the defensive end, and Jay Wright-kind-of-special offensively.
It’s not shocking it took a minute to click. That’s a familiar story in the transfer portal era as newcomers try to understand their roles in a new system, and Neptune was replacing his entire rotation outside of Longino and forward Eric Dixon.
Dixon, it turns out, was ready to emerge as the nation’s best scorer — he leads Division I with 25.6 points per game. And while he came out hot right away this season, it took a bit for the other guys to figure out how to fit around him.
The evolution of this team was on display against the Huskies, when Dixon struggled in a 1-for-8 first half and Villanova still led by seven at the break.
Dixon found his way in the second half, operating mostly from the middle of the floor where UConn couldn’t bring a double team. He scored 18 of his game-high 23 points after halftime.
“The doubles were actually good, too,” Neptune said. “Like, he’s making great passes. We don’t fear him getting doubled. We try to keep switching it up so they can’t get locked into where he’s going to get it. I really don’t care where he gets it. He can get it in the middle, on the block, he’s going to make a good decision for our team.”
And the good decisions are mostly happening all around. Jhamir Brickus has settled in at point guard and is turning it over less frequently than he did early in the season. Wooga Poplar, the highest-profile portal add, has figured out the spots where he can attack, often taking advantage of Dixon’s gravity giving him space to work. There’s also a lot of old-school picturesque Villanova basketball: draw two to the ball, kick it out, make the extra pass and bury open 3s. The Wildcats are shooting 41.4 percent from deep, third-best in the nation.
Neptune will tell you they haven’t accomplished anything yet, still a long way to go and so on. But there’s hope for a fan base no one could have blamed for starting to feel apathetic. Of course, how Neptune is judged at the end of this year could have a lot to do with whether Villanova makes the NCAA Tournament or not. That’s starting to look possible, but it’s not going to be easy in a league that didn’t dominant in nonconference play and only received three bids last year. If Villanova can finish in the top four, it’ll at least be on the bubble, and that’s progress.
And maybe it’s worth reminding everyone that a young Jay Wright didn’t make it to the NCAA Tournament until his fourth season and there were those questioning whether he was the guy early in his tenure. Neptune inherited a much better situation, but sometimes it’s worth waiting for a coach to figure out his way.
(Photo: Kyle Ross / Imagn Images)
