PHILADELPHIA — It was Sunday night, and former Villanova champion coach Jay Wright felt the urge to send one of his champion players a text.

“I always text him — ‘Stay hungry and humble, you have a beautiful mind. Don’t let the NBA change your beautiful basketball mind,’ ” Wright told The Post.

No one knows better than Wright how fortunate Jacque Vaughn and the Brooklyn Nets are to call Mikal Bridges one of their own.

“He’s so unique, and he’s such an incredible person and player,” Wright said before Game 2 of the Nets’ opening-round playoff series against the Sixers, which they lost, 96-84, on Monday night. “He’s already got a great contract and having a great career, I just don’t want it to change him, so he can enjoy the rest of his life as a beautiful person.”

What Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart have brought to the Knicks with their unselfish and make-the-right-play ways is what Bridges has been bringing to the Nets, who needed every bit of his rising star to overcome Joel Embiid, James Harden and the powerhouse Sixers.

“Right away when he got here,” said Wright, once Villanova Basketball, Always Villanova Basketball, “we saw the skill level. But the passing, the basketball I.Q., the ballhandling — he was just really thin when he got here. And we were really good, and a mature team, and he would just get banged around literally to the point that we thought he was gonna get hurt.”

Here Wright mentions Hart.

“He would torture Josh Hart in practice with his length,” Wright said. “And then, if he had a breakaway or something, Josh Hart would just take him out, clobber him, knock him to the floor. And he’d always bounce back up, never a problem. Those two used to go at it all the time. Great respect for each other, but Mikal was a skinny little guy, Josh was at the time like physically mature, tough. A guy that was a year older than him. But he always had the skill level.”

Bridges, who scored 30 points in Game 1 and added another 21 in Game 2, has averaged 26.1 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 2.7 assists since the Nets acquired him in the Feb. 9 Kevin Durant trade. There is more of a scoring burden on him in Brooklyn than there was at Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pa., on his Team Final AAU team, for Villanova, and for the Suns.

“He recognizes that that’s what this team needs, and he’s very comfortable doing it,” Wright said. “And he does throughout his career when his team needs it, but he’s always been on good teams. So his teams didn’t need him to be the leading scorer.”

There were times when Villanova did.

“We were playing in the Bahamas in that big tournament, we were down to Clemson at halftime like 14, and he took over the second half,” Wright recalled. “We we’re playing Gonzaga at the Garden, he took over the second half. NCAA Tournament, and it’s a second-round game we’re playing Alabama, we struggled in the first half, and he just took over the game, and just went off … he’s gonna do what the team needs. It sounds simple, but it’s his beautiful mind. He’s got a beautiful basketball mind.”

Asked about Bridges’ skill set offensively, Wright said: “He’s a great ball handler, great passer, decision-maker, he’s got a mid-range game … he’s got it all. Anybody else that would have had those skills, would focus on those skills and not the defense and rebounding and making the right play. They would focus on that, and when there would be games and they hit a couple of shots and they knew they had the skills to do that, and the ball didn’t come back to ’em, they would either get frustrated or they’d find a way to make sure they got the ball and get shots.”

Wright flashes back to Bridges’ freshman year.

“His iconic moment was a Final 8 game in his freshman year,” Wright said, “when it was the final possession of the game, we had the lead, and he made a steal against Kansas, knocked the ball away, dove on the floor, jumped on the loose ball and called timeout. He wasn’t even a starter, but he always was in the game at the end.”

In short, Bridges is a coach’s dream.

“I think he could be an All-Star,” Wright said. “It just depends on how they need to use him.”

Wright, a rising star himself these days for CBS Sports, was asked if he had a message for Nets fans.

“Just appreciate him as a winner,” he said. “He wants to win worse than probably any Nets fan wants them to win. Regardless of how many points he scores, regardless of what his role is, he really looks at the game every time he plays a game as, ‘I just want our team to win.’ It’s simple, but we know how rare that is these days.”

No one is prouder of Mikal Bridges than his old coach.