The Wildcats guard went from a high schooler few wanted to offer to the core of a perennially contending team. It wasn't by accident.
He won the Big East player of the year award, for the second time, in a second “senior” season; only this time, he didn’t share the hardware. He staked the Wildcats to an early lead, scored 10 points in one roughly two-minute stretch, dished an assist, grabbed a steal and never cracked so much as a smile. When asked about the last trip here compared to this one, Gillespie did not, well, want to remember the Alamo. He said the two tournaments “didn’t really correlate,” and yet, they kind of do. “Stay the course,” he told them, and Jim thought, Didn’t Collin embody his own advice? At the Final Four in 2018, held in San Antonio, he sat with the walk-ons and role players in the far corner of Villanova’s locker room. “It’s, My brother is bigger and stronger, but I'm going to win to win the fight.” In the 206 minutes he has played in the NCAA tournament, Gillespie has six turnovers. He didn’t want to participate in the NBA combine on a not-yet-recovered knee. He didn’t consider “seven or eight” broken noses to be significant; rather, he viewed them as part of the price he paid. But as Gillespie held the Big East tournament trophy above his head a few weeks back, his guard went down, and he sounded human, all but confirming his coach’s description of the past year in one sentence. Collin underwent surgery to repair the ligament, then watched the rest of March Madness from the colonial-style house where he grew up in Philadelphia. He was immobilized, lost in a fog of anesthesia and unable to do what he does best, which is will, guide and shoot Villanova basketball to wins. Basically everything that’s on display this March, when almost exactly a year after his surgery—367 days, to be exact—he vaulted the Wildcats over Creighton, the same opponent from the injury, to win this Big East tournament.