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.
