The lone No. 1 seed gets hot early and holds off the short-handed No. 2 seed Wildcats in an 81-65 Final Four game Saturday in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — Kansas and Villanova waged a 3-point shooting contest at the Final Four with one of them racing out to a big lead in the opening minutes and the other spending the rest of the night trying in vain to catch up.But in a rematch of a rout by the Wildcats four years ago in San Antonio, it was the Jayhawks who joyously walked off the court with the win this time at the final buzzer Saturday night.
Playing without injured guard Justin Moore, Villanova watched as Kansas scored the game’s first 10 points and eventually built a 19-point cushion. And despite big nights from Collin Gillespie, Brandon Slater and Jermaine Samuels, the short-handed and undersized Wildcats never made it all the way back.
Unlike that night, though, it was the Jayhawks who pounced on Villanova at the start, trying to run ragged a team whose depth problems were only compounded by the loss of Moore, who tore his Achilles tendon in the regional finals. Whenever Agbaji, the Big 12 player of the year, wasn’t enjoying the soft rims of the Superdome to knock down 3s, the 6-foot-10, 250-pound McCormack was having his way with the undersized Wildcats in the paint.
“This is legit revenge for 2018,” tweeted the Mavericks’ Jalen Brunson, who had a big role for Villanova that night.Daniels, the New Orleans native who began his career down the road at Tulane, kept making hustle plays around the basket, and Gillespie, the blue-collar kid from Philadelphia, was able to knock down a couple of contested 3s.
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