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Some Thoughts on Villanova Beating La Salle Inside of a Not-Full Finneran Pavilion
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Nova beat La Salle 80 to 59 on Tuesday night at the Pavilion.
The game was closer than the final score indicates.
La Salle was down five at halftime and did a nice job hanging in there despite foul trouble keeping both Anthony Finkley and Rob Dockery off the floor. Nova didn’t play their best game, but had an eight-point lead with eight minutes remaining before they blew it open and went on a big run to cover the -20.5 spread.
The Wildcats got big games from front court starters Luigi Suigo and Devin Royal, who combined for 34 points on 12-24 shooting and went to the foul line 13 times. The pair also tossed eight assists as La Salle opted to attack Nova’s ball handlers, allowing the bigs to roll with a numbers advantage. The Explorers go deep, 10 men playing every night for Darris Nichols, but they only shot 33% and 6-25 from three, and Suigo made everything in the paint really difficult. Nova’s defense was very good.
They look better this year, La Salle, and they can be competitive in the A10 if Finkley and Dockery can stay on the floor. Both fouled out on Tuesday night. Finkley scored 19 against Long Island and Dockery is their best player, but he’s been crushed by foul problems in two of the three games this season. RJ Smith looks like a fun player, the freshman out of Roman Catholic, and Kam Burton isn’t afraid to chuck it.
Nova didn’t get a great night out of Tyler Perkins, who shot 2-7 from three and turned the ball over six times, but he’ll have better games. He didn’t look like himself. More importantly, they struggled in the front court last year and were a guard-heavy team, but now they’ve got great center and power forward pieces with Royal and Suigo.
Anyway, the Pavilion wasn’t full:
It’s funny because Kevin Willard disparaged La Salle last month when he said the Cats don’t want to go to Olney to play in front of 400 people. I guess they’ll play them at home inside of a not-full Finn instead. Not sure if that’s an indictment on Nova, or La Salle, or maybe both.
The crowd was okay, but you could see some pockets of empty seats even on television. There didn’t seem to be much juice for this one. Did La Salle have any fans there at all? It looked and sounded like a scrimmage on television. Same thing with Temple and Richmond at The Palestra the other night. Ticket prices can certainly be whack, but people don’t seem to care about college basketball the way we did 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago. We need to come to the realization and acceptance that Big 5 basketball doesn’t move the needle in 2026, and if it does, it’s basically St. Joe’s, Temple, and Villanova alumni yelling at each other on social media about who is to blame for Nova’s exit. It also doesn’t help that five of the six teams haven’t been that great going back a decade. And NIL and the transfer portal are negatively impacting the sport far beyond the Philly region.
Mind you, the Sixers were playing a high-profile game against the Celtics on the same night, but if people cared about the Big 5, they’d show up, which they are not. We’ll see how the next batch of games turns out, with Temple and St. Joe’s hosting this weekend.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com