Cinderella stories make the NCAAB exciting
I grew up back east as a New York Knick fan and attended Syracuse University, which used to be in the Big East Conference.
So I may have been more interested in Georgetown’s Big East basketball tournament final against Creighton last Saturday than a lot of our readers out here on the West Coast. But the upset win by the Hoyas is a prototype for what makes college basketball so compelling.
The intriguing sidebar to the game is that Patrick Ewing, the former great Knick center, is the coach of Georgetown, and the final was being played at Madison Square Garden, his former stomping grounds.
Ewing, who was an assistant coach in the NBA for 15 seasons, has never been given a shot as a head coach in the league. So in 2017 he settled on coaching Georgetown. He felt like he had something to prove to those who didn’t believe he could be a successful coach.
If you saw the game, you witnessed a staggering defeat of Creighton by the Hoyas. Georgetown was tied 12-12 coming into the contest, while the Bluejays were 20-7. Creighton was the No. 2 seed in the tournament; Georgetown was seeded last at No. 8. Creighton was 14-6 in the Big East standings; Georgetown was 7-9.
In the final, Creighton jumped out to an early lead and looked like the clearly superior team with brisk passing and easy buckets. But the Hoyas managed to tie things up, taking advantage when Creighton sat its best player, guard Marcus Zegarowski, for a brief spell. The game was locked at 18-all when the Hoyas went on a remarkable 18-0 run to close the first half.
Georgetown never took their foot off the gas in the second half and finished off the Jays, 73-48, to win the Big East title and gain an automatic bid in the NCAA tournament. They looked like the Hoyas of old, including the team that won the 1984 NCAA championship, with lockdown defense and hard-nosed play.
The tournament final win was the only way Georgetown, which was 9-12 overall entering the tournament, could have made the 64-team bracket. The Hoyas ran off four victories in four days to clinch the Big East tourney championship.
In addition to Ewing’s return to the Garden, the other nostalgic note was that March 13 — the day of the tournament final, was 49 years to the day when Georgetown hired John Thompson to coach its basketball team. Ewing helped the Hoyas reach the NCAA finals in three of his four years playing for Thompson, who passed away last August and was a father figure to
Ewing.
Ewing, an NBA Hall of Famer for the Knicks, told the Associated Press that the win over Creighton was right up there with any of his accomplishments at the Garden.
“A lot of people discredited. Talked bad about us. We believed in ourselves,” Ewing said. “We worked hard. We fought hard.”
A lot of people didn’t believe Ewing could coach, either. Prejudice and stereotypes seem to have been at work.
Ewing’s high school coach, Mike Jarvis, told The Undefeated, “He should have been a head coach. Why it’s taken this long? Because a lot of people don’t look at big guys, for the most part, as being intelligent guys. There are size and racial stereotypes working against him — a whole mentality, you know. It’s like the little guys, the point guards, they’re supposed to be the smart guys, even though some of those guys couldn’t even play. That’s what a lot of basketball people sadly think. But a big guy — especially if he’s a big, black guy — it’s like, ‘How bright can he be?’ It’s wrong.”
Ewing is aware of the stereotypes.
“I’m here where a lot of people didn’t think that I had the ability to (be),”
Ewing told The Washington Post. “And I’m proving everyone wrong. I worked at this craft 15 years in the NBA, (then was) given the opportunity here at Georgetown. And we’ve been through some trials and tribulations — kids leaving, guys stepping up and playing to exhaustion last year. This year started off slow with all the new faces. But everyone
has done their part to get us to this point.”
Five players transferred out of Georgetown between the end of last season and the start of 2020-21. The Hoyas had only two returning starters, and Jalen Harris, a key graduate transfer who picked up the starting point guard role, left the program midseason.
Ewing grabbed Chudier Bile as a transfer from
Northwestern State and Donald Carey from Siena. He recruited freshman Dante Harris as his starting point guard.
There was a different hero every night during its Big East tournament run. Harris scored 18 and Qudus Wahab scored 17 in the upset over Villanova. Jamarko Pickett scored 19 in the win over Seton Hall in the semis. Bile starred in the title game by scoring 19 points against Creighton.
Not a single Georgetown player was named to the first or second AllBig East squad. But the Hoyas play an unselfish, aggressive, blue-collar brand of basketball that left many of the experts with their jaws hanging after the Hoyas dismantled Creighton.
Georgetown is the underdog again in the NCAA tournament. The Hoyas are the No. 12 seed in the East Region and face No. 5 Colorado in the first round on Saturday in Indianapolis.
“We didn’t just come for one or two games,” Ewing told The Washington Post. “We’ve come here to last as long as we possibly can. The task is still the same. There’s nothing different. The only difference is we’re in the NCAA tournament. … Why can we make a run? We believe in ourselves. We have worked hard to get to this point in the season. And anything is possible.”