Patrick Ewing had a number of crowning achievements at Madison Square Garden as a player. Now, he has one as a coach that can rival any of them.
Georgetown looked like it had transported itself back to the 1980s. Only instead of John Thompson patrolling the sideline, his greatest player was in his spot, old No. 33.
After four years of disheartening defeats, player transfers and questions about the program’s direction, Ewing engineered a historic run at the Garden over four nights. The Hall of Fame player guided his eighth-seeded Hoyas to a Big East Tournament title with an all-encompassing domination of second-seeded Creighton, 73-48, Saturday night.
“It’s right up there,” Ewing said, when asked how the title compares to the feeling of winning as a player, first with the Hoyas and later with the Knicks. “It was a different chapter in my life. As a player, I’m the one out there trying to score, block shots, rebound. And as a coach, I’m here where a lot of people didn’t think that I had the ability to [be]. And I’m proving everyone wrong.”
The stunning and one-sided victory handed Georgetown (13-12) the automatic, and very unlikely, berth to the NCAA Tournament. The Hoyas last went dancing in 2015. They last won the Big East Tournament title in 2007. They became the first team to win four games in as many nights since the creation of the new Big East in 2013.
Georgetown’s victory came on the 49th anniversary of the university hiring Thompson, who died last August at age 78. Together, Thompson and Ewing won three Big East titles and a national championship in the early 1980s. Ewing said he felt as if Thompson were watching him become the first person in history to win a Big East championship as both a player and a coach — in the building where his Knicks jersey hangs in the rafters.
The Hoyas’ unbelievable run, the first time a team that was picked to finish last in the Big East went on to win the conference tournament, likely will the league four teams in the field of 68. Creighton, Connecticut and Villanova are expected to receive at-large bids Sunday night.
“I keep talking about that Drake song,” the 58-year-old Ewing said. “Drake, he’s probably going to get some more money now because I’ve been saying it so much: We started from the bottom; now we’re here. We started at the bottom; now we’re number one.”
Creighton (20-8) was an 8 ¹/₂-point favorite and had all the star power. An All-Big East first team selection, Marcus Zegarowski. One of the nation’s premier shooters, Mitch Ballock. An attack ranked 11th in the nation in offensive efficiency.
Georgetown didn’t have a single player honored on either the first or second team. Point guard Dante Harris, so impressive all week, wasn’t named to the All-Freshman team. Chudier Bile was playing in the low-major Southland Conference last year. They all looked like superstars the past four games, a group of guys dismissed by so many experts.
The same could be said of Ewing, who many pegged as another NBA guy who couldn’t hack it coaching in college. He lost his three most talented players last year to transfers and this season’s team started 3-8.
“A lot of people disrespected us. Talked bad about us,” Ewing said. “We believed in ourselves,”
Bile led four Hoyas in double figures with 19 points and eight rebounds. Qudus Wahab, who has emerged as a difference-maker in the pivot, had 11 points and 12 rebounds. Jahvon Blair had 18 points and Harris, an unranked recruit, notched 10 points, eight rebounds and five assists en route to Most Outstanding Player honors of the tournament.
Zegarowski scored 17 points for the Bluejays, who were held to a season low in points.
The game felt over by halftime, following a 30-5 Georgetown run that put the Hoyas up by 18. It gave Ewing plenty of time to savor his greatest accomplishment as a coach in the same place he had so many fond memories as a player.
“It means the world,” Blair, a senior, said of being part of Ewing’s first championship game. “It’s his first time. It’s my first time, Jamorko [Pickett’s] first time. We started with him [from] day one. Just to see how happy he is just makes me happy. Everyone’s happy.”
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