BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 11, 2021

Jay Wright

Villanova Wildcats

Madison Square Garden

Postgame Media Conference

Georgetown - 72, Villanova - 71

THE MODERATOR: We'll start with an opening statement from coach.

JAY WRIGHT: Yeah, credit to Georgetown. They played great. It was a great college basketball game and I just thought they played really well. Down the stretch it got down to a one-possession game and they executed those last two possessions a little bit better than us. I thought their guards were great. Harris, we had a tough time controlling Harris, and Wahab was really tough too. So good team. They're playing good basketball at the right time of year.

Q. You mentioned the, Georgetown being better with their possessions down the stretch. They had, they scored on their last three possessions. What was happening defensively where you couldn't come up with the stops?

JAY WRIGHT: They just did a good job isolating the people they wanted to and, on our team, and making great individual plays. I thought they got Harris isolated a couple times, made some great plays, Blair, he hit a big three. They got him isolated. They get a couple big offensive rebounds too that got them to the foul line. They did a great job of driving the ball and drawing fouls and getting to the foul line.

Q. The free throw discrepancy, they made all 23 of theirs and you had 14 of 22. It's usually the other way when Villanova plays sometimes. What was it like today to be outdone from the line like that?

JAY WRIGHT: Well, believe it or not, even though we have been pretty good at that, it's not something that we worry about because just some nights they're just not going to go in. It's all the other things that we just talked about, like committing fouls on drives and giving up offensive rebounds, not being physical to defensive rebound. Those are the things that we feel like we can control. Some nights your shots just don't go and it's something that we just have been struggling with this year and we're going to just keep working, as long as we can keep playing, and try to get better at it.

Q. Obviously as tough as this was, you had guys like Chris get some real meaningful minutes in this atmosphere, even though it wasn't fans in the stands. How much can that help, especially just getting used to being able to kind of jell on the court with everybody as you get ready for next week?

JAY WRIGHT: It's real important for us to get guys like Chris Arcidiacono and Bryan Antoine, Eric Dixon, getting those guys minutes in this type of atmosphere. We did have some fans. It was pretty cool to have some fans in there, not a lot, but I hope that can give us some depth in the NCAA tournament.

Q. You guys had 28 points in the paint in the first 30 minutes and then only two for the rest of the game. How much was that an emphasis to go to the post early and did you see anything that they adjusted to even when they were in foul trouble to negate that late?

JAY WRIGHT: Yeah, they pressed us -- when they started pressing when they were down, we just didn't get the ball where we wanted to. I think you're right, once they started pressing, we got some shots, but we didn't get the ball inside to Jeremiah and Jermaine like we wanted to and I thought that made a difference.

Q. Can you just talk about what was going on the last eight minutes of the game, you only scored 10 points, and what was going on with the foul shooting today?

JAY WRIGHT: Well, like I said, the free throw shooting, believe it or not, we don't really -- we don't make a big deal out of that. Because we work at it, that's all you can do. Some days they're going to go in, some days they're not. But down the stretch we just, we didn't execute as well as we wanted to. We came away with a lot of empty possessions. And some of those were missed free throws. Some of those were actually good possessions and then we missed free throws.

Then, at the other end, down the stretch, we weren't getting stops, so we didn't get any easy baskets because we didn't get any stops.

Q. How was it seeing Justin Moore back out there?

JAY WRIGHT: You know, it was great, it was a shock, we truly prepared not to have him. Our trainer told us the best chance it would be if he maybe could play Saturday, if we made it. He didn't practice yesterday or anything, they just said, in warmups today, they said he looked great and they thought he could give it a shot. And he did and he did a great job.