Nova has followed up The Maddy Siegrist Experience with two missed NCAA tournaments. Is that going to change this coming season?
Team: Villanova Wildcats
2024-25 Record: 21-15, 11-7 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Fifth, one game behind Marquette and three games in front of DePaul.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #67
Her Hoop Stats: #80
BartTorvik.com: #58
Postseason? After toppling Marquette in the Big East tournament quarterfinals and losing to UConn by 28 in the semifinals, Villanova continued their postseason run in the WBIT. That’s the NCAA’s secondary postseason event, and the Wildcats were a #4 seed on their side of the bracket. VU beat Boston College at home, top seeded Saint Joseph’s on the road, and Portland at home in order to advance to the WBIT semifinals at Hinkle Fieldhouse. They ran into Belmont there, and took a 66-57 loss to the Bruins.
Notable Departures: Villanova had eight players who appeared in at least 31 games and average over 16 minutes per game last year. Six of them are gone, five because they were on their final year of eligibility anyway.
If you want to try to frame things in a positive “well, we can replace these pieces somewhat easily” manner, you could. Of the seniors that are departing, Maddie Burke was the leading scorer at just 6.4 points per game. Lara Edmanson was the leading rebounder out of the five at 3.1 per game, and she was only playing 18 minutes a game while starting just 10 times. Kaitlyn Orihel and Bronagh Power-Cassidy tied for the assists lead in that group of five at just 1.4 per game. Burke and Power-Cassidy both shot over 38% from behind the three-point line last season, and they were the two most accurate shooters on the team.
I didn’t find a way to work Jaliyah Green in there, but you can’t just ignore someone who played 17.9 minutes per game while appearing in all 36 games. Yeah, 3.3 points and 2.4 rebounds isn’t a lot of contributions elsewhere on the stat sheet, but she was chewing up a lot of rotation minutes.
The lone transfer exit from the program is Maddie Webber. She averaged 13.3 points, 2.9 rebounds, and 2.2 assists per game while playing 33 minutes and starting in every game last year as a sophomore. The Pittsburgh area guard elected to depart, and she’s now at Illinois.
Notable Returners: Look, it’s not all bad news. Leading scorer Jasmine Bascoe returns after putting up 16.2 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 4.3 assists per game as a freshman last year. Leading rebounder Denae Carter (6.5 per game) also returns for the Wildcats. Those are the two 31 games/16 minutes players that I didn’t mention in the last section.
Ryanne Allen is back on the Main Line for her senior season. She averaged nearly 16 minutes a game while coming off the bench 27 times in 2024-25. Allen missed nine of Nova’s first 10 games, so she was in the rotation the rest of the way. I think we can squeeze Dani Ceseretti in here after she averaged 9.3 minutes in 30 games. The six she missed were scattered around the season, so maybe saying she was a core rotation player as a freshman is a little inaccurate. I think we should probably mention Brynn McCurry here as well, even though she missed all of last year after an ACL tear. Back in 2023-24, McCurry was kind of on the Ceseretti plan in terms of minutes and impact as a freshman. With so many seniors departing, there’s clearly a spot for players familiar with the VU system to start occupying a notable role.
Key Additions: And speaking of filling in a role on a team, that certainly looks like the possibilities for the two incoming transfers on the Villanova roster. Kelsey Joens was a part-time starter for Iowa State in the last two seasons, getting the nod 22 times in her 68 contests. She averaged 19.2 minutes per game in both seasons, and even though she shot 41% from behind the arc for her career, she averaged just 5.2 points to go with 3.2 rebounds and a little over an assist. In case you’re wondering: Yes, she’s the younger sister of Ashley Joens, Iowa State’s all-time leading scorer, but the two never played together for the Cyclones.
Kylee Watson has one year of eligibility left after 1) starting her career at Oregon during the 2020-21 season and 2) tearing her ACL at the very end of the 2023-24 season at Notre Dame. That meant that the 6’4” forward from New Jersey sat out all of last year while rehabbing the injury. The former #17 prospect in the country according to ESPN averaged 6.5 points and 4.6 rebounds in 24.7 minutes per game in her two seasons of competition at Notre Dame and can probably step right into the VU starting lineup at the 5 spot.
There are four freshmen on the Villanova roster, with Kennedy Henry probably leading the way there. The 6’0” guard from Delaware is ranked #77 in the country by Blue Star Basketball and the only one of the four that’s listed at all. She’s also at #79 according to ESPN. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about the impact of twin sisters Brooke and Elise Bender on the roster and in the locker room. The two obviously have an on and off court chemistry already, and there can be upsides and downsides to that.
Coach: Denise Dillon, entering her sixth season at Villanova and 23rd as a Division 1 head coach. She has a record of 114-51 with the Wildcats and 443-255 overall.
Outlook: After back-to-back 11-7 seasons in Big East play, I think it’s time to say something out loud about Villanova women’s basketball.
That is as follows: The Wildcats haven’t made the NCAA tournament without leaning on the best scorer in program history since 2018… and even when they did make the tournament with Maddy Siegrist doing the things, they were a #11 seed in her junior year after not making the tournament the year before and sitting at #84 in the RPI when the NCAA shut the 2019-20 season down during Siegrist’s freshman campaign. After missing the tournament in the year following Siegrist, Lucy Olsen and Christina Dalce bolted from a team that went 22-13 and 11-7 in the Big East instead of sticking around to see what they could do if they ran it back.
That chance at running it back was this past season where Denise Dillon turned the keys over to Jasmine Bascoe and ultimately came up short in their quest to send five seniors off on a high note with an NCAA bid. Now those seniors are gone AND Maddie Webber elected to go the Olsen/Dalce route and transfer to a Big Ten team, all of which seems to nudge Villanova in the direction of a step backwards for next season.
I’m saying that Maddy Siegrist’s senior year was an aberration relative to the general level of what Villanova basketball is with Denise Dillon as the head coach.
I thought last year was a pretty solid change of pace for the Wildcats, shifting the balance of things to a more diversified attack. In the wake of Siegrist’s departure to the WNBA, VU just let Lucy Olsen have all of Siegrist’s usage, and unsurprisingly, that didn’t work out so well for them. This past season, Jasmine Bascoe and Maddie Webber were about even in usage according to HerHoopStats.com, and Denae Carter wasn’t too far behind them, either. None of the three had a particularly high turnover rate that was over-inflating that usage, but at the end of the day, we have to acknowledge that this arrangement between the three of them didn’t end up all that differently than the Lucy Olsen Does The Things season did.
And now Webber’s gone, choosing to transfer instead of playing in the same arrangement with Bascoe and Carter in 2025-26. That’s probably not a great sign for Villanova’s prospects this year.
You know what would be a good sign, though? Playing some defense. The Maddy Siegrist aspect of all things deservingly gets a lot of the headlines for that postseason run…. but the fact of the matter is that Dillon was coaching a HHS top 90 defense that season. No, that’s not great, obviously…… but it is better than being ranked somewhere between #131 and #237 by Her Hoop Stats on the defensive side of the ball as the Wildcats have been in Dillon’s other seasons in charge. In case you were wondering: Yes, the #237 was this past season.
Maybe being forced to swap out a lot of her roster because of eligibility will cause a shift in things for Dillon. Maybe having one year of Kylee Watson in the paint helps the Nova defense out a bit. Maybe Kelsey Joens shines a little brighter now that she’s not in the shadow of her big sister. There’s a lot of reasons for optimism for Villanova here, but at some point, the Wildcats have to pay off on that optimism if they expect us to keep thinking that we should be looking for signs of optimism.
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