NEW YORK — They call it the city game here — or, rather, the City Game — and as much as Gotham is associated with the Yankees or the Empire State Building, basketball just about seeps from the cracks in the asphalt. Forget that the Knicks are a mess and that there's not a college power residing in any of the five boroughs. Basketball matters to New York, period.
What’s apparent here this week, though, is that New York matters more to basketball than the other way around.
“The fact of the matter is New York City is the capital of college basketball,” said Miami Coach Jim Larranaga, playing the role of Bronx native/chamber of commerce chair.
The people who run the sport don’t need to be told.
“We felt like we needed to be here,” said John Swofford, the commissioner of the ACC.
So they are. And so are others. The college version of the city game is undergoing a tug-of-war for New York’s attention, not to mention its venues. The ACC (headquarters: Greensboro, N.C.) is holding its annual tournament in Brooklyn this week and again next year. The Big Ten (headquarters: Chicago) will hold its annual tournament at Madison Square Garden in 2018. When it does so, it will have to move its schedule up by a week because the Big East (headquarters: New York) still maintains its hold on the Garden.
Yes, it may have member schools in Omaha, Milwaukee and Indianapolis, but try to pry the fingers of the Big East — fractured in so many ways — from gripping the Garden. This week, they’re celebrating 35 straight tournaments there, and the contract to remain runs through 2026.
Jim Boeheim didn’t need to outline his plans for the best way to develop the ACC in the future, though the Syracuse coach was only too happy to volunteer them Wednesday. “There’s no value in playing in Greensboro,” Boeheim said. “None.”
“I can’t be as eloquent as Jim,” Louisville coach and native New Yorker Rick Pitino said before eloquently ticking off the reasons it makes sense to play here.
“Why do you think the Big Ten is coming into New York?” Boeheim said. “It’s business, good business sense. They all say it’s a business. Well, then, let’s start acting like it’s a business.”
Which is what these leagues have been acting like for, oh, more than a generation now. The ACC’s arrival in New York is one of the outgrowths of expanding from nine schools to 12 schools to its current 15, programs from South Florida to Boston to Indiana and Kentucky.
The new members all came from the Big East. Back in 2003, when the ACC began poaching its rival conference, Barclays Center in Brooklyn, host of this year’s ACC tournament, didn’t exist. But once it opened, staging the conference’s signature event here became inevitable.
"We felt like it made sense to come to New York and didn't make sense not to," Swofford said. "It's New York and the media capital of the world, and it has this great history with the game of basketball, and there are various business opportunities that originate out of this city."
That’s it, of course: business. Likewise, that matters. Once the Big Ten snared Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East, it was going to pursue tournaments in Washington (this year) and New York (next). Business.
The ACC tournament is running concurrently with the Big East tournament, a nod to another pull.
“Don’t ever forget your roots,” North Carolina Coach Roy Williams said Thursday.
Williams’s roots are in the hills of western North Carolina, then in college in Chapel Hill as a player — and later assistant — under Dean Smith. He has an affinity for the tournament in Greensboro, but he has no problem with it here, either. But he dismisses the idea, in the age of social media, that a conference needs to be in New York to take advantage of the media market.
"We don't need the New York Times to find out what in the dickens is going on in the country," Williams said (failing to point out we do need The Washington Post). "You know, our president tweets out more bull[dung] than anybody I've ever seen."
(Thanks, Roy, for attempting to hijack a completely innocent piece on basketball and New York City. Back to our regularly scheduled story.)
Boeheim, of course, has a meaningful perspective on all this, having coached for so long in the Big East tournament and now ending his career in the ACC — without changing jobs. But Larranaga might be even more well-rounded. He played at Providence College under Dave Gavitt, who essentially created the beast that was the Big East by moving the tournament — which had been in Providence and Syracuse and Hartford — to the Garden. Later, Larranaga became an assistant at Virginia. When he was, the ACC had eight members, four of which were in North Carolina. The modern ACC, he argued, has outgrown its old market.
“We’ve taken the crème de la crème of one league that was highly thought of and put it with the crème de la crème of the ACC,” Larranaga said. “And now we have, in my estimation, the best basketball conference in the history of college basketball.”
On Thursday afternoon, that conference staged a quarterfinal game between Louisville and Duke. Barclays Center, sleepy for long stretches of the first two days, booed lustily at Duke’s Grayson Allen for what looked like a shove, then thundered when Duke’s Luke Kennard hit a late, tiebreaking three-pointer.
Games like this have been staged in, yes, Greensboro for years. But by virtue of the Blue Devils’ victory, the sport’s best rivalry — Duke vs. North Carolina — will take place in Friday’s first semifinal.
Duke-North Carolina in New York. It’s not just about who reaches Saturday’s championship game. It’s about taking the spotlight of this massive city and steering it away from the hometown Big East and the waiting-in-the-wings Big Ten. It’s about showing the City Game cognoscenti who plays the best brand of basketball. This is a turf war, and it’s really just now starting.
For more by Barry Svrluga, visit washingtonpost.com/svrluga.
