Villanova basketball players see what outsiders don't

THERE SEEM to be two Villanova men's basketball teams: The one with numbers attached to it. And that other one that only the Wildcats seem to see.

We see a team with zero seniors, with more than half its scoring gone from last season, a team picked to finish in the second tier of the Big East this season.

They see depth and height, the likes of which Jay Wright said he's never had before, even during that Final Four run in 2009.

"We're even bigger," the 'Cats' coach said at yesterday's media day.

We see a six-game losing streak that ended last year's thud-to-the-ground finish. They see a team that was improving amid each of those losses, building equity for this year.

"Probably anybody on the outside couldn't see it," junior Dominic Cheek said. "But as a Villanova family, we saw us getting better."

This, you may recall, was the approach their coach took at the time, seeing the rim half full each time a shot rimmed out. We thought it was spin then, but he's sticking to it now, too.

"I do not want to avoid the truth," he said. "We lost our last six games and we do not want to lose games. But on the inside, that team stuck together. Our team wasn't as upset after we lost in the Final Four, or when we lost in the Sweet 16, as it was when we lost to George Mason. And not mad upset, but crushed. Because they were so together. That's what we took out of it."

Expectation is an important word in college hoops. So are perception and projection and just about every other word you can think of that ends in those same four letters. Last year, the Wildcats were perceived to be a Final Four candidate, and expected to beat teams like South Florida and George Mason, especially toward the end of the season with a veteran team. This year, they are projected to be in the middle of the Big East pack, based on the departures of Corey Stokes and Corey Fisher, and big man Antonio Pena.

They are projected to be a mistake-filled team of youngsters, especially at the start, even though that veteran team fell apart at the end of the season with exactly those kind of maddening mistakes. Throughout this summer and early fall, as the team matched up against pro teams in Europe and locked-out alums at home, those mistakes were used as teaching points by Wright, who holds out hope that the learning curve with this young, talented group will be short enough to surprise people when 2012 rolls around.

"We can't deny that we lost those six games," Wright said. "And they judge you on the outside by whether you win or lose. But the way we judged ourselves on the inside was, 'Did we ever quit on each other? Did we ever quit on what we believed in? Did guys play hurt?' Yeah, we missed some shots, made some mistakes. But no one ever quit. And you have to feel good about that, and about the leadership returning. Because they kept it together."

The leadership returning is really two guys. There is Cheek, a talented 6-6 junior guard from Jersey City who often settled for outside shots last season and too often missed them. And there is Maalik Wayns, the Philly kid who picked Villanova because of its tradition of great guards, then watched both Scottie Reynolds and Corey Fisher struggle at times under the demands and expectations that tradition brings.

Now it is Wayns' turn. In some respects, the modest expectations of this team relieve him of some of the burden Reynolds and Fisher felt. But as a local kid positioned for greatness out of Roman Catholic, Wayns is under a different type of scrutiny. At times in the past, he says, he worried too much about a missed shot or looking bad, and his game suffered.

Now? "I feel 100 times more mature than I did at the end of last year," said Wayns, a 6-2 junior. "I'm making better decisions on the court. My jump shot has improved. The game is slowing down so much for me. I'm seeing things now that I haven't seen in the past 2 years.

"It's almost like I can be an extended coach Wright on the floor. I don't know as much as he does, but I know where guys are supposed to be, I know every play inside and out. I just feel like I'm growing up on the court."

Said Wright: "It's an interesting topic. You could write a book on that. But when you're a highly touted player in college basketball now, recruiting is so publicized that sometimes you're in a position where it's impossible to live up to the hype. And usually, that would mean it would be tough on a local kid, what we're asking of Maalik. Because people expect him to be great, expect him to be a star.

"We're trying to teach him just to evaluate himself based on the reality of his progress and not what everyone's expectations are."

There it is, that word again. The one that informs projections and taints perceptions, the one that extinguished last year's team.

And, they all hope, will ignite this year's one.

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