NEW YORK — Patrick Ewing rarely raised his voice as he shuffled a mile on his creaky knees along the Madison Square Garden sideline Wednesday night. Villanova was in the process of destroying Georgetown, 80-48, in the first round of the Big East tournament, and in a 12-hour period, Ewing was the last longtime Big East legend to suffer the kind of loss that can cause a coach to curl himself into a ball and ask himself why he ever entered the profession in the first place.
In Greensboro, N.C., Syracuse had lost to Wake Forest in the ACC tournament on a buzzer-beater, and afterward, Jim Boeheim hadn’t retired or resigned as much as he had forced Syracuse’s administration to fly him back to Onondaga County, N.Y., and dump him in a snowbank. Here, Seton Hall’s Shaheen Holloway watched his team burp up a four-point lead to DePaul — and perhaps an NCAA Tournament bid — with 17 seconds to go on a fouled 3-pointer and an overturned goaltending call. But neither of those outcomes was as embarrassing or as consequential as Georgetown’s was to Ewing.
The Hoyas have gone 13-50 over the last two years, a once-proud program falling into the hardest of times. And if there were any doubts that the best player in Big East history wouldn’t be back to coach what has become the Big East’s worst team, a 32-point rout by the conference’s crown-jewel program likely did away with them.
“No thoughts about my future,” said Ewing, who is 75-109, with one NCAA Tournament berth, over his six years as Georgetown’s head coach. “The two seasons have been rough. Disappointed in the outcomes of these last two years. My future is in the hands of our president and our [athletic director] and our board of directors.”
Once, a generation ago or more, it was the other way around. It was Ewing, more than anyone, in control of the future of the Hoyas and the Big East, and both institutions had their heydays because of him: three Final Four appearances in four years for Georgetown, a national championship in 1984, that title-game upset on April Fools’ Day 1985, when Villanova did exactly what it had to do to beat the Hoyas: play a perfect game.
In that less-enlightened era, Ewing and John Thompson and their Georgetown teams were big, bad villains merely for being tough and awesome and Black. But Villanova’s miraculous victory in ‘85 wouldn’t resonate so much still if the Hoyas weren’t so good then, and for anyone who remembers those days, it had to be sad to see an icon like Ewing, who put in 15 years as an NBA assistant before Georgetown hired him in 2017, presiding over a decline like this: 6-25 last season, 7-25 this one.
“It was a rough year,” he said. “It’s not the year that we thought we would have had. … At the end of the day, we’ve got to win.”
Big names falling short in the Big East
Wednesday was the 10-year anniversary of the announcement that the Big East would remake itself as a 10-school league built on the premise that basketball, for its members, came before football. Villanova’s dominance — its two national championships especially — through the conference’s subsequent half-decade acted as a tide to lift several of the new Big East’s boats. Marquette, Creighton, Xavier, Providence: They’ve all thrived. Georgetown has sunk like a stone, the latest sign that a coaching name that tickles Baby Boomer and Gen-X alumni doesn’t necessarily make a difference in the modern age of college basketball.
St. John’s tried the same trick with Chris Mullin in 2015, and he lasted just four years, went 59-73, and never got the Johnnies past the NCAA Tournament’s First Four round. Take another example. Ewing and Georgetown recruited Villanova forward Eric Dixon. But the decorated resumé of the Hoyas’ head coach — his 17 seasons in the NBA, his Hall of Fame career with the Knicks — wasn’t nearly enough to persuade Dixon to say no to Jay Wright and the culture he’d created.
“Legendary players are cool to everyone,” Dixon said. “I’m not sitting here scoffing at Patrick Ewing or Chris Mullin.”
And yet …
“I took the approach of, every coach is going to say whatever to you to get you there,” Dixon continued. “More for me, it was going around the school, being around the guys, feeling that community feel, the way guys care for one another. Every staff is great, but what makes this place special was the staff and the players. It was like a brotherhood. For me coming out of high school, that’s what I was looking at.”
‘Are you coming back?’
Someone asked Ewing late Wednesday night if he wanted to remain Georgetown’s coach, and he said: “Look, I listened to Coach Boeheim’s press conference after the game, and everybody was just ranting about ‘Are you coming back or what?’ I am proud of being a Georgetown Hoya. This institution has been great to me over the years. I’d be honored to come back as the coach here. That’s it.”
Yes, that’s probably it for him. There were 3.3 seconds left in Wednesday’s game when Ewing stood at midcourt, hesitated, then stepped toward Kyle Neptune and the Villanova bench to shake hands with the Wildcats’ coaches and players. Two cameramen followed him off the floor as he headed to the locker room, to a future that is ostensibly unknown but seems pretty easy to predict. Bad night for the old Big East. Worst of all for the greatest giant of its past.
