Nova Report
Villanova takes on the Xavier Musketeers at 6:30 pm eastern on FS1 in Cincinnati’s Cintas Center. Xavier is -3/146.
The 10-7 Musketeers are fighting for their NCAA Tournament lives as are the Villanova Wildcats. A loss here would be crushing. Xavier has decent wins vs. Wake Forest and South Carolina. They’ve lost to Michigan, Cincinnati and TCU outside of conference and UCONN, Georgetown, Marquette and St.John’s In conference. Zach Freemantle is their primary scorer at 17.4 ppg. Conwell can also shoot: 40% from 3 and 16.1 ppg. McKnight registers 10.5 ppg, Swain 9.4 ppg and Foster 8.4 ppg. They play up tempo, like to shoot 3’s and draw a lot of fouls. They are soft on the offensive glass.
For the Wildcats, they went ice cold in the last 5 minutes of their recent loss at St.John’s. Additionally, leading scorer, Eric Dixon, has had two straight poor shooting games. Four of their six losses were determined by not executing in the final 5 minutes. On the bright side, Poplar, Brickus and Longino continue to score when Dixon doesn’t. Tonight, they’ll get open 3’s which they need to hit north of 40%, some offensive glass opportunities but will need to get back on defense and communicate quickly. As they did that (mostly) vs. St.John’s they should do that again tonight. They need to restrict fouls as Xavier is excellent from the free throw line.
On paper, and likely in reality, this will be a closely contested contest as both teams are fighting for their tournament selection lives. Believing that Nova’s Dixon will right his shooting woes, I am backing Villanova tonight.
My Nova Pick:Villanova +3
Nova Pick Record: 8-9