VILLANOVA, Pa. — The head coach’s sneakers. The music on the radio during a recruiting road trip. Slightly less cursing. Oh, and a little more pre-practice film. That’s it. After rooting around the Finneran Pavilion during Villanova media day and talking to Wildcat players, that’s the sum total of the differences between Kyle Neptune and Jay Wright.
Most of which can be summed up under one big umbrella: Neptune is 23 years younger than his predecessor. “Yeah, I mean Coach Wright was like a father figure to all of us,’’ says assistant coach Mike Nardi, who played for Wright. “Nep’s more like a cool uncle. You still have that respect for him; it’s just different.’’ The cool uncle, for example, is wearing sweet, Villanova light blue/dark blue Jordans. Wright never wore high tops. The cool uncle opts for Jay-Z while riding down the road with assistant coach George Halcovage for a recruiting trip. “Jay liked the Chainsmokers. I miss the Chainsmokers,’’ Halcovage says. “Right,’’ explains senior guard Chris Arcidiacono, cutting to the chase. “That’s the music my dad listens to.’’ The old guy cussed more, and the new guy likes film a little bit more.
Otherwise? Otherwise, it is business as usual, down to which hand goes up and which down during drills, how practice is run, and of course, how practice ends — the huddle breaks with the familiar refrain repeated ad nauseam under Wright. “Attitude.’’ Media day even starts on Wright’s Elvis time. That is to say, a good 15 minutes later than scheduled. “I mean, no difference really,’’ junior forward Eric Dixon says. “Everything. How we huddle up, what we do, it’s all the same.’’
It’s not, of course. It is, in truth, exactly the opposite. Things are very, very different at Villanova. The man who won two national championships and crafted both a style of play and a culture that now ranks as the standard bearer in men’s college basketball is off somewhere being Jay Wright for a living. He spent the summer posing for pictures in golf foursomes, gripping and grinning his way through various corporate appearances, and serving as the grand marshal for the Ocean City Night in Venice boat parade. He has not been out recruiting or trying to figure out what to do without Collin Gillespie and sans Justin Moore for the foreseeable future. He flitters in every now and again — he showed up at Hoops Mania, and visits an occasional practice — but for all intents and purposes, Jay Wright has left the building.
In his place is a man who has coached 32 games and won 16 of them. Neptune makes no apologies for doing everything the way his predecessor did. Neptune is a disciple, his coaching teeth cut at Villanova first as Wright’s video coordinator, and later as his assistant. “This was my first real coaching job,’’ Neptune says. “How to run a practice, how to run a program, I learned all of that stuff here. So what this place is, I believe in, so it will be very, very similar.’’ In his lone year as a head coach, at Fordham, he tried very hard to mimic what he was taught under Wright, though the steep grade of the learning curve made actual implementation difficult. When he returned to the mothership, to a roster filled with seven returning players who were reared in Villanova, he saw absolutely no reason to upset the apple cart. “I mean it’s the whole ‘if it’s not broke, why fix it,’ right?” Nardi says. No, there is no real arguing that point. It would make zero sense to come in and turn Villanova into something else entirely for the sheer vainglorious need to put your own imprint on things.
Thanks to Philly’s own @MeekMill for putting on a show ! pic.twitter.com/9qrhkYOk7i
— Kyle Neptune (@kyleneptune) October 3, 2022
Pressed, Neptune admits he’d like to play a little more up and down this year, and go deeper into his lineup. But that is more in response to personnel than a purposeful shift away from Wright, who kept his rotation especially tight. Villanova this year does not have an obvious go-to star, at least until Moore returns from his Achilles injury. There is no bail-out player, no Gillespie or Jalen Brunson to hand the ball off to when the game is on the line and exhale. Instead, Neptune starts the season with a bunch of upperclassmen role players (Caleb Daniels, Brandon Slater, Arcidiacano and Dixon) and some very talented freshmen (Mark Armstrong, Cam Whitmore and Brendan Hausen) to choose from. Consequently, Neptune has no choice but to fiddle with the lineup, to try out combinations and rotations to see what works. And he’s got a lot of guys who can shoot and move, so why not get up and down?
But there also is a fine line between changing just for the sake of change, and making something your own. In Neptune’s 19-minute press conference with the media, Wright’s name was referenced directly or indirectly 24 times. He was not in the building, but he was certainly floating around in its air. Neptune didn’t seem to mind. “I never focused on not being him,’’ he said. “I mean, he’s a Hall of Famer, to me the best coach in college basketball the last 10 years. I would like to be a lot like him, if you know what I mean?”
But the full break hasn’t happened yet. Neptune is still very much the man who replaced Jay Wright; not yet the head coach at Villanova. Some of that is time. He has not publicly performed the act of coaching the Wildcats, after all. At some point, though, there probably needs to be at least a subtle exorcism— not a throw-everything-away-and-embark-on-a-brand-new-frontier shift, but subtle tweaks that make this Neptune’s team.
Hubert Davis did that. He found a way to play the Hubert version of the Carolina Way. He opted out of the more traditional two-big approach and spread the floor with shooters, a la Brady Manek. By extension, UNC took more 3s than it did the year before (38 percent of total field goal attempts, up from 27, per KenPom). It wasn’t a complete reversal, but a subtle shift that Davis made intentionally. By the end of last season, North Carolina was Hubert Davis’ team. He was not the placeholder, sitting in for Roy Williams, nor was he asked about replacing his boss any longer.
Odds are Neptune will find his detours, too.
For now, he’s at least got the shoes.
(Top photo of Kyle Neptune: Matt Rourke / AP)
