Team: Villanova Wildcats
2023-24 Record: 22-13, 11-7 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Three-way tie with St. John’s and Marquette for third, ended up losing the tiebreaker to St. John’s but beating Marquette to end up as the #4 seed in the conference tournament.
Final 2023-24 Her Hoop Stats Ranking: #40 out of 360 Division 1 teams
Postseason? After getting dumped out of the Big East tournament in the quarterfinals by Marquette, the Wildcats found themselves in the WBIT, the secondary tournament run by the NCAA. They were a #1 seed in the event and made a four game winning streak run to the title game where they lost 71-57 to Illinois.
Key Departures: For the second straight season, Villanova loses the sun in their helio-centric offense. A year ago, it was Maddy Siegrist heading off to the WNBA Draft where she was the #3 pick in the draft. This year, it’s Lucy Olsen..... but she’s not in the WNBA. She’s transferring to Iowa for her final season of college hoops. The 5’9” guard takes 23.3 points, 4.8 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.9 steals per game with her.... and more than 20 of Villanova’s 61 field goal attempts per game, too.
Losing Siegrist to a top 5 pick? These things happen. Losing Olsen when the Wildcats bent over backwards for her to the tune of Her Hoop Stats’ #11 usage rate and not even a top 1,000 effective field goal percentage? Kinda not great, it seems, yeah?
Also gone: Christina Dalce, who has transferred to Maryland for her final year of college hoops. She averaged 8.3 points, 9.4 rebounds, and 2.3 blocks per game for the Wildcats last season, although that block total is clearly elevated by the seven she had against Marquette on January 17th, including essentially winning the game herself by rejecting (nearly) everything MU threw up on the final possession. I for one will not miss her, but I can recognize it’s a notable loss for the Wildcats.
There are two more starters gone from the Villanova roster as well. Bella Runyan appears to have wrapped up her four years of playing at VU and left college basketball even with a bonus year of eligibility available to her. She averaged career bests in points (7.5), rebounds (4.7), assists (3.7) and steals (1.5) per game this past year, so she’s going out on a high note if nothing else. Zanai Jones started in all 31 of her appearances for Villanova as a junior, but she’ll be in Dallas and the ACC to play for SMU this coming season. She wasn’t an effective three-point shooter this past year at less than 28%, but she averaged 6.7 points, 2.6 rebounds, and 1.9 assists, all career bests.
Key Returners: All of that makes Maddie Webber Villanova’s leading returning scorer at 7.7 points per game this past season. As a 5’11” freshman, Webber made 11 starts in 29 appearances as the Wildcats shuffled the deck around in their fourth and fifth starting spot on a mostly regular basis.
Things start getting a little sparse in terms of statistical contributors, but that’s what happens when Lucy Olsen is literally one-third of your offense and Christina Dalce is just short of 10 rebounds a game and you choose to play at one of the 30 slowest tempos in the country. There’s a trio of women who averaged somewhere between 11 and 24 minutes per game for Villanova and two of them saw time in the starting lineup. Maddie Burke might be one of your more odd stat lines, as she started 20 times in 35 appearances but averaged less than 19 minutes per game by the end of the season. Kaitlyn Orihel started fewer times (eight) than Burke, but she was playing nearly 24 minutes a night in her 33 outings and shooting nearly 37% from long range, which is a notable exception on last year’s roster. Brynn McCurry has that 11.6 minutes average, so we’re not surprised that she averaged just 2.7 points and 1.8 rebounds last season.
We should also mention Denae Carter, a 6’0” forward from Philly who missed all of last season with an injury after transferring in from Mississippi State. She averaged 6.1 points and 8.1 rebounds as a freshman, but then had her minutes slashed for whatever reason as a sophom*ore. 4.2 points and 4.7 rebounds isn’t bad for 15 minutes a game, but if she was playing 10 minutes less per game, you can understand why she may have transferred back home. If she’s healthy, she can put up numbers, but the health issue is up in the air until we see her on the court.
Key Additions: I will note that Villanova has three freshmen on their roster and I will also note that even Villanova’s SID office doesn’t particularly seem that interested in pumping up the prep careers of any of the three women. They don’t appear to be tippy top recruits, but we can at least pretend that they were shining stars at their high school or what have you.
Anyway, Villanova has supplemented their roster with four transfers, two of which will only be on The Main Line for one season. We’ll start with Bronagh Power-Cassidy, who hails from Ireland, but I suspect that you already suspected that. The 5’10” guard was a four year starter at Holy Cross and she wrapped up her career there averaging 16.8 points, 4.9 rebounds, 1.8 assists plus a steal per game. Her three-point shooting improved every single season, and she cashed 40% of her 6.3 attempts per game in 2023-24.
The other COVID bonus year player is Lara Edmanson, who spent four years at Santa Clara out in California. The 6’0” Australian forward was a starter for the Broncos in the past two seasons, and had a 7.5 point, 3.7 rebound final year. Her ability to drain threes is something that we may need to keep under a microscope as the season went along. Freshman year: 3-for-11. Sophom*ore year: 46% on 22 attempts. Junior year: 18% on 44 attempts, and yes, this means that she tried twice as many three-pointers and made fewer overall in total. Senior year: 48% on 50 attempts. In theory, Odd Year Curse kicks in here and Edmanson can’t hit the broad side of a barn, but who knows?
Jaliyah Green will also probably only be at Villanova for one year, but she’s not a COVID bonus player. She starred at Southeast Missouri State, earning “most of the time” starter status in her first two seasons and starting all but one time this past year. As a junior, the 5’10” guard from Saint Louis averaged 12.7 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 1.7 assists. She’s never been a long range threat even though she’s averaged at least 2.4 attempts per game in all three seasons of college hoops.
Finally, Ryanne Allen is one of the most traditional type transfers that you’ll ever see these days. She left Vanderbilt after two seasons where she went from 21 minutes per game and occasionally starting as a freshman to playing in 30 games for a second straight year but only averaging 6.7 minutes. Can’t really be surprised that she’s pulling up stakes midway through her collegiate career, right? It doesn’t hurt that she’s from 20 miles away from Nova’s campus, either. When she was getting big run for the ‘Dores, the 6’1” guard averaged 6.4 points and 2.5 rebounds, and she has shown the ability to knock down a three. Heck, given that she was barely playing as a sophom*ore, it’s pretty impressive that she was essentially hopping off the bench cold and connecting nearly 38% of the time.
Coach: Denise Dillon, entering her fifth season at Villanova and 22nd as a Division 1 head coach. She has a record of 93-36 with the Wildcats and 422-240 overall.
Outlook: Probably not super great.
In 2021-22, Villanova rode the Maddy Siegrist train to a 24-9 record but just a #11 seed in the NCAA tournament. They did pull an upset of BYU in the first round, but took a 15 point loss to Michigan after that. One year later, everyone got back on board the Siegrist Express as they went 30-7, earned a #4 seed in the tourney, got to host games, and used that to propel the squad into the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2003.
Cool, neat, great, no problems here, hard to argue the point when Siegrist is a double-double threat every night and shooting nearly 35% from long range for her career.
Denise Dillon inherited Siegrist from Harry Perretta’s final team, and she saw what she had and went with it. Again: Cool, neat, great, no problems here.
My question last year was what was Dillon going to do when she wasn’t gifted Villanova’s all-time leading scorer and a truly special talent on the court? Everyone can look at Maddy Siegrist and say, “yep, I get it.” What do you do when you don’t have her?
As it turns out, the answer was apparently “Keep the exact same attitude and structure, except let Lucy Olsen play Maddy Siegrist’s role.”
Uh, this did not work and that probably should have been obvious that it wouldn’t work.
Maddy Siegrist never had an effective field goal percentage lower than 50.8%, and never lower than 53% after her freshman year. Lucy Olsen while playing next to Maddy Siegrist for two years couldn’t break 48% eFG% and didn’t do that when defenses were gravitationally pulled towards stopping Siegrist. Part of that is because Olsen isn’t the inside scorer that Siegrist is and a lot of that might just be that she’s four inches shorter. Two different types of players, and so on. Part of that is bad luck, because Olsen did knock down 36% of her three-pointers during Siegrist’s senior year, and she did that on nearly four attempts per game. The bad luck kicks in because Olsen started taking nearly 1.5 more threes per game and made less than 30% of them overall last season.
And that’s how you end up going 11-7 in the Big East and missing the NCAA tournament. You put almost all of your eggs into one cart, and it turned out that it had a sticky wheel and it didn’t move the way you wanted it to move.
Now, it also doesn’t help that Villanova as a team couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from behind the arc. They went from hitting at least 30.9% of their threes as a team during Dillon’s first three years, the three with Siegrist, including nearly 33% during Maddy’s final year, to just 29.4% last season. They had just one woman averaging more than one attempt per game that was a plus-shooter, and that was Kaitlyn Orihel at 36.7%. Everyone else was at 33.1% or lower, and that’s below the 33.3% cutoff where your effective field goal percentage works out to 50%. Oh, and that woman was Bella Runyan, who’s gone now...... oh, and the next two on the shooting percentage chart were Lucy Olsen and Zanai Jones.... so congrats to Maddie Webber and her 26.6% on being the second best returning shooter.
On top of all of this: Lucy Olsen and Christina Dalce left with eligibility left on the clock. The two pillars of last year’s team, including the player that Dillon entrusted the day-in, day-out success of the offense to, decided that, for whatever reason, that they didn’t want to do that for Villanova any more.
So what does Denise Dillon do now? Does she let Bronagh Power-Cassidy take all of those shots for the one year that she’s in Philly? Does she re-orient the system in general and try a more mixed variety of offense? Does she merely pick up the pace a bit because you can afford to miss a few more shots when you’re not one of the 30 slowest teams in the country?
Do the Wildcats just get lucky that they’re part of a giant mish-mash of question marks heading into 2024-25 below the clear top two of UConn and Creighton in this league and take advantage of what continuity they do have? Is that enough to send them back to the NCAA tournament? Or will things get worse and we circle back next year to say “hey, this thing is really not going in a good direction here, do something different before it’s too late?”
