Villanova hits season-high 17 three-pointers, runs over Seton Hall, 80-52

For one half Sunday against Seton Hall, Villanova played somewhat erratically on offense but did well enough on defense to take a decent cushion into the locker room at halftime.

But once the 18th-ranked Wildcats got their three-point shooting straightened out in the second half, they made the rest of the afternoon at Wells Fargo Center seem like an eternity for the Pirates.

The Cats knocked down a season-high 17 threes, 11 in the final 20 minutes. Phil Booth connected on seven of them for a game-high 25 points, and his team rolled to an 80-52 Big East victory for their eighth consecutive win before a crowd of 16,444.

Villanova (16-4, 7-0 Big East) led, 30-20, at the break despite 40.7 percent shooting and 10 turnovers, but set the tempo on the defensive end. The Wildcats forced the Pirates (12-8, 3-5) into 14 turnovers and limited them to 1-of-11 shooting in the final 7 ½ minutes of the period.

The defense also bottled up junior guard Myles Powell, who entered the game as the conference’s second-leading scorer with a 22.2-point average. Powell didn’t take his first shot until midway through the first half, and made it, but that was his only field goal of the game.

Powell finished 1-of-4 for four points, missed all three of his three-point tries, and committed seven turnovers. He played just five minutes in the second half.

“I think (the first half) was our best half of defense” of the season, Villanova coach Jay Wright said. “There were some possessions early where they got out in transition, and we got out and deflected some passes to Powell, which created turnovers.

“That’s hard to do and it’s something we work on that we haven’t really been good at, our transition defense. I thought that was pretty good in the first half.”

The Wildcats regularly switch on screens defensively. Eric Paschall appeared to have primary responsibility for Powell on a number of possessions, but he deferred when it came to taking credit for stopping him.

“We just played him as a team,” he said, “listening to our coaching staff and playing him as a team.”

Seton Hall got as close as 33-24 early in the second half before the roof caved in. Hitting 12 of their first 17 shots, the Wildcats outscored the visitors 31-9 over a stretch of 9 minutes, 34 seconds to take a 64-33 lead with 9:18 left in the game. The margin got as high as 35 later on.

“We have great shooters, we know it,” Wright said. “We want them to play with that confidence all the time, so we’re never worried about missing shots.”

The Wildcats shot 54.8 percent in the second half, 47.8 percent from three, and six different players hit at least one shot from deep. The one-sided margin gave Wright a chance to get Booth and Paschall, both of whom average about 35 minutes per game, to the bench relatively early. Before he left, Paschall hit a jumper to reach 1,000 career points at Villanova.

Seton Hall shot just 34.6 percent for the game. Myles Cale led the Pirates with 14 points.

The game marked the 68th time Villanova and Seton Hall have met since 1980-81 when both were members of the Big East at the same time, and marked the second-largest margin of victory for the Wildcats, topped only by a 76-46 rout in 2017 at the Pavilion. The win was the 17th in a row at home for ‘Nova over the Pirates.