Corey Fisher

So, when was the last time Villanova's basketball team got any good news? Yesterday, senior guard Corey Fisher, the team's top scorer, underwent what coach Jay Wright described as a "precautionary" MRI exam on his right knee. Fisher has tendinitis in the joint, and his status was listed by a team spokesperson as day-to-day. The 19th-ranked Wildcats (21-9), who were once 16-1 and have now lost their last three games, are at No. 4 Pittsburgh (26-4) Saturday afternoon in their regular-season finale.

Who: No. 15 Villanova (21-8, 9-7 Big East) at No. 9 Notre Dame (23-5, 12-4) When: 7 o'clock Where: Joyce Center, South Bend, Ind. TV: ESPN Radio: ESPN (950-AM) Notes: These two teams seem to be going in opposite directions - Villanova lost for the fourth time in six games, falling to St. John's, 81-68, Saturday at the Wells Fargo Center. Notre Dame has won nine of its last 10, including a 60-48 win over Seton Hall on Saturday . . . Villanova's leading scorer, Corey Fisher, is shooting 4-for-26 with 10 points total in the last two games . . . The Irish can lock up the double bye in the Big East Tournament with a win . . . They also can go undefeated at home for the first time in 3 years . . . The 48 points allowed against Seton Hall is the fewest Notre Dame has allowed in a Big East game in 7 years.

As expected, Villanova senior guard Scottie Reynolds has been named to the six-man all-Big East first team. But maybe what wasn't so anticipated was the fact that he was the only unanimous selection. The conference head coaches do the choosing. They are not allowed to vote for one of their own players. The player of the year will be announced tomorrow in New York between sessions of the opening-round doubleheaders of the conference tournament at Madison Square Garden. Reynolds would appear to be the favorite.

Up to this point in the season, Villanova still was seeking a signature victory to prove to the rest of the Big East and the nation that it was NCAA material. Playing the last college basketball game at the Wachovia Spectrum, where Jay Wright said it felt like "100 degrees in there," the Wildcats got it. Going into that game, the Wildcats were 0-4 against ranked teams, having lost to Texas, Marquette, Louisville and Connecticut. Wright said that although he understood outsiders' perception, he wanted to make sure that his team did not place too much emphasis on those losses, looking ahead instead.

Guard Malcolm Grant, who became a part of Villanova basketball lore after leading the Wildcats back from a 21-point deficit in December against Louisiana State, is leaving the team and will transfer. The university said yesterday that it had released Grant from his scholarship and that he will pursue a transfer to another university. Grant, a 6-foot guard, averaged 5.6 points in 29 games in his freshman season at Villanova but had three explosive scoring games, two of which keyed Cats victories.

Villanova previewed some of its taller lineups Tuesday night during a 95-58 victory over District of Columbia in an exhibition game at the Wells Fargo Center. The units worked well, mainly because the sixth-ranked Wildcats held a height advantage at every position over the Division II Firebirds. But they will be helpful later on, particularly when 'Nova begins Big East Conference play in January. Coach Jay Wright started his three seniors - Corey Fisher, Corey Stokes, and Antonio Pena - along with sophomores Mouphtaou Yarou and Maalik Wayns.

Villanova senior guard Corey Fisher underwent an MRI exam Wednesday that revealed tendinitis in his right knee, coach Jay Wright said. Wright said Fisher's status was day-to-day leading up to the Wildcats' regular-season finale Saturday at No. 4 Pittsburgh. Fisher, who is averaging a team-high 15.7 points in 30 games, had been in a slump since scoring a career-high 34 points in a Feb. 19 overtime victory over DePaul. He scored eight and two points in the Wildcats' next two games, and broke an 0-for-21 drought on three-point attempts with a pair of threes in the second half of Monday night's 93-72 loss to Notre Dame.

STORRS, Conn. - Corey Fisher and Kemba Walker have been friends since their preteen years in the Bronx, so they must have known that each was going to try to carry his team Monday against a tough opponent. Neither player disappointed. Fisher, the Villanova senior, scored a career-high 28 points and single-handedly kept the seventh-ranked Wildcats in the game. But it was Walker, a national player-of-the-year candidate, who provided the game-winner - a 10-foot floater in the lane with 2.5 seconds remaining - that gave No. 8 Connecticut a 61-59 victory over the Wildcats in an entertaining Martin Luther King Jr. Day matinee at Gampel Pavilion.

Villanova coach Jay Wright tries to be kind when he speaks of the effort of reserve center Maurice Sutton in practice. "We try to temper our expectations with Mo because he's not one of the best practice players you've ever seen," Wright said. But Wright concedes the 6-foot-11 Sutton had his best two days of practice before Tuesday night's game against Marist. The work showed as he helped lead the sixth-ranked Wildcats to an 84-47 win over the Red Foxes in the first round of the NIT Season Tip-Off at the Pavilion.

Maalik Wayns, a 6-foot point guard from Roman Catholic High School, will hold a news conference tomorrow to announce where he will attend college. All signs point to Villanova. Several sources close to the rising recruit have indicated that the Wildcats are his choice. And Wayns, who has an unofficial visit to the Main Line campus planned for today, intimated as much Tuesday evening. "Basically, it's [Villanova]," said Wayns, a junior-to-be. "If everything goes the way I expect, I'll commit.

Villanova's Big Five schedule appears to be the perfect training ground for Maalik Wayns to establish himself as the team leader, something he showed Tuesday night at crunch time with La Salle ready to spring a stunning upset. Wayns sank only 5 of 16 attempts from the field, but three of the five came at the end of regulation and in overtime as he sparked the Wildcats to a 76-69 victory over the Explorers at the Pavilion. Villanova coach Jay Wright is expecting good performances from Wayns.

Villanova's Big Five schedule appears to be the perfect training ground for Maalik Wayns to establish himself as the team leader, something he showed Tuesday night at crunch time with La Salle ready to spring a stunning upset. Wayns sank only 5 of 16 attempts from the field, but three of the five came at the end of regulation and in overtime as he sparked the Wildcats to a 76-69 victory over the Explorers at the Pavilion. Villanova coach Jay Wright is expecting good performances from Wayns.

Twenty-seven days. For 27 days, at the height of the 2010-11 basketball season, Villanova went without a victory. At a time when teams were building momentum for conference tournaments and the NCAAs, the Wildcats were in free fall, losing their last six games, including a first-round NCAA defeat to George Mason that brought their season to a sudden end. After a 16-1 start, the Cats finished 5-11. There were nagging injuries to Corey Fisher and Corey Stokes, plus a late-season injury to Mouphtaou Yarou, and the February schedule was brutal.

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.

PATRICK CHAMBERS knew there would be plenty of setbacks in his first year coaching the Penn State Nittany Lions, but maybe not this early. "We barely had 10 guys at practice a week ago," he said. With four senior starters gone from a basketball squad that finished 19-15 last season under former coach Ed DeChellis, the last thing Chambers needed was a number of preseason injuries. Promising freshman guard Trey Lewis has been hampered by an unspecified ankle injury, and sophomore guard D.J. Newbell has been missing with a broken shoulder.

There's a chance Temple's Lavoy Allen and Villanova's Corey Fisher and Corey Stokes will be excluded from Thursday's NBA draft. Just don't tell that the former Big Five standouts. All three remain optimistic despite being left off most mock drafts and receiving little to no pre-draft buzz. "The [Charlotte] Bobcats have a couple of first-round picks," said Stokes, a 6-foot-5, 195-pound guard. "They told my agent that they really like me a lot. . . . The Cavs like me. My agent got on the phone with the Nets [June 15]

TWO YEARS AGO, Villanova's basketball program was coming off its first Final Four appearance in a quarter-century, the culmination of a five-season run in which the Wildcats got to a Final Four and a pair of Sweet 16s. At the time, it seemed as if the only question was how high was up? These days, that seems like quite a while ago. Because ever since then, the endings haven't been happy. After a program-best 20-1 start in 2009-10, they dropped six of their final nine to finish 25-8, losing in the second round of the NCAA Tournament as a No. 2 seed.

SO, WHERE TO NOW? Two years ago, the only two questions Villanova fans were asking were when are the Wildcats getting back to another Final Four and when are they going to actually win the national title? And why not? They'd just reached the Final Four for the first time in a quarter-century, after going to a Sweet 16 the previous March, a Final Eight in 2006 and the Sweet 16 in '05. Well, these days they mostly want to know how come Jay Wright forgot how to do his job?

CLEVELAND - Nine days of good practices, togetherness, motivational talks by the coaching staff, and players being healed of their injuries couldn't help Villanova change direction on one of the most dismal finishes to a season in recent memory. This time, the Wildcats couldn't make a field goal in the final 3 minutes, 28 seconds, failed to grab a key rebound, and came up empty on a defensive stop in the closing seconds Friday, losing to George Mason, 61-57, at Quicken Loans Arena and leaving the NCAA tournament after just one game.

CLEVELAND - Jay Wright used to brag about how his big-time program did not include big-time pressures. He could screw up a game on Sunday and not hear about it on Monday thanks to the Eagles, Phillies, Flyers, Sixers. OK, so maybe not the Sixers. Anyway, those days are gone. These days, Wright's bragging, if you can call it that, is about his Villanova team holding it together amid the adversity and scrutiny produced by a five-game losing streak. He employs words like "psyche" and "perspective," and deftly digs at criticism by lauding how players, like embattled senior guard Corey Fisher, have handled it. Clearly, he is grasping.