HOOP CENTRAL
With Big East and ACC in town, NYC is the heart of Madness
The center of the college basketball world is back in New York City.
Four years after the basketball-only Big East realignment, some of the biggest teams in the country will once again decide their conference championships in the Big Apple. Yes, the Big East will still have its devoted fans filing into The Garden, but there will be some strong competition only a few miles away with the ACC — and traditional powerhouses such as Duke, North Carolina Syracuse and Louisville — playing its tournament simultaneously at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Jay Bilas was at Duke in the 80’s and experienced four ACC Tournaments as a player, but he fell in love with the aura of the Big East Tournament at MSG as an ESPN analyst before the conference moved over to FOX Sports in 2013.
“I just think it’s the biggest stage,” Bilas said. “Having done the Big East Tournament all those years, I just think it’s the best place to do a tournament.
“I played in the ACC and if you would have told me back when I was playing that New York was a better place to do a tournament or the Big East would be better than the ACC Tournament I wouldn’t have believed it, but it was and New York was a big part of that. When you are going to do it on that level, New York is the place to do it.”
The ACC Tournament will be in Brooklyn this year and next before going back to North Carolina (first Charlotte, then Greensboro) in 2019-2020. Beyond that is undecided with conferences like the Big Ten also vying for a spot in the media capital of the world.
Next year will be extreme madness with all three conference tournaments in the city as the Big Ten will be played the week before the Big East at MSG.
“It’s something they should consider permanently, whether it’s at Madison Square Garden or the Barclays Center,” Bilas said of the ACC.
The Big East is no slouch, though. It boasts the defending national champions in Villanova, NCAA Tournament locks Butler, Creighton and Xavier along with local-favorite Seton Hall trying to maintain its tenuous hold on a berth.
But the Big East conversation always starts with Villanova.
“They are not quite as good. They are still darn good, though,” Bilas said comparing this season’s Villanova team to its titlewinning squad.
“They are very capable of winning this whole thing. I’ve been very impressed with the high level of consistency they’ve had. They’ve slid new players into spots that were occupied by different players last year, and they are still the most efficient team offensively
and defen- sively in the league. They’ve got a budding star at point guard in Jalen Brunson. Darryl Reynolds is going to have to get healthy and play at a high level, but they’ve got quality depth.” While Villanova will be trying to secure a top seed for the NCAA Tournament, the ACC also has a potential No. 1 seed in North Carolina. What the league also boasts is a stunning amount of depth behind the Tar Heels, as only N.C. State, Pittsburgh and Boston College have no chance at getting an at-large NCAA Tournament bid.
“There’s not that much separation [between the ACC and the other conferences], it’s just that the league is as deep as it’s ever been and the coaches would admit that,” Bilas said. “There’s more balance. From the top to the bottom there’s more capable teams than there have been in years past where it took an extraordinary effort to beat the top teams.”