The thing that has always made the Big East Tournament and Madison Square Garden such a magical 35-year marriage is the uncanny way so many conference teams have been able to transform the World’s Most Famous Arena – WMFA, for short – to a homecourt-fieldhouse-of-the-moment.
For St. John’s it was easy: The WMFA is one of its home courts. But over the years the Garden has also become a de facto home in early March for Syracuse, for Villanova, for Seton Hall, for BC and Providence, its proximity to so many member schools allowing easy access for fans to make what’s supposed to be a neutral site into something else, depending on the year, depending on who’s hot.
It’s a different dynamic this week, when the Big Ten arrives a week ahead of the Big East to conduct its tournament. Maybe if Rutgers were a little further along in its rebuilding cycle, the Scarlet Knights could claim Manhattan as their own, but since theirs is likely to be a cameo stay at best, you may be looking for a team to adopt.
To give a little home-town love to.
And here is my eternal candidate for that when it comes to the Big Ten’s basketball league: Michigan. Because while Michigan may well be up there as the Big Ten-i-est of all Big Ten brand names, and nobody’s idea of a crowd-pleasing underdog ever, the Wolverines are coached by John Beilein – whose teams, if you like basketball, and especially if you love basketball, are impossible not to root for.
“Look, everyone knows how pretty his offenses are,” says Mike MacDonald, who coaches at Division II Daemen College in Buffalo but did an extensive internship under Beilein during five seasons as his top assistant at Canisius. “All those 3s, all those backdoor cuts. But what makes him the coach he is? It’s his understanding of fundamentals. That applies to on the court …”
MacDonald pauses.
“But also off the court, too,” he says. “And right about now, it’s not such a terrible thing to remember how valuable that can be, too.”
We are square in the epicenter of the sport’s darkest hour, and it only promises to get gloomier as we learn more about the FBI’s digging into the game’s corrupt core. Already Michigan’s conference neighbors in East Lansing, Michigan State, have been nicked by shrapnel, adding to a difficult couple of months for the school that will bring the No. 1 seed to New York.
Meanwhile, Beilein has guided the Wolverines to another fine season, 24-7 and 13-5 in the league, a No. 15 poll ranking, playing as well as anyone outside of the ever-present Spartans heading into this inaugural gala at the Garden. They don’t shoot as many 3s as they usually do, and they don’t shoot free throws especially well, but somehow they have authored a quintessential season for them in Beilein’s 11th season in Ann Arbor: 20+ wins (for the eighth time) and an all-but-certain eighth trip to the NCAA Tournament.
“Some coaches, you talk about what their ‘specialty’ is,” Jim Boeheim said a few years ago. “John’s specialty is a simple one: winning.”
Boeheim has told the story about making the 10-minute trek across town, along Salt Spring Road, from his office at Syracuse to the gym at LeMoyne when Beilein was coaching there years ago, slipping in unannounced. The men weren’t friends; Boeheim simply wanted to observe a young master at work.
It is part of the Beilein narrative that he’s never spent a day as an assistant coach, jumping right into the top job at Newfane High School as a 22-year-old in 1975 before stops at Erie Community College, Nazareth, LeMoyne, Canisius, Richmond, West Virginia and Michigan, a deliberate climb up a coaching ladder that tends to reward short cuts.
“That’s really an important part of figuring out why he’s been successful,” MacDonald says. “He’s always been his own man, his own boss, been forced to figure things out on his own, and he’s worked plenty of years at places where he didn’t have people doing the little things for him, he had to do them himself.”
As he says this, MacDonald is walking along Main Street in Buffalo carrying a cellphone in one hand and a basketball rim from Daemen’s auxiliary gym to the main one because there is a home playoff game Wednesday and someone bent one of the main rims and someone has to replace it.
“This,” he says, laughing, “is the kind of job John had to do for an awful lot of years before he reached the Big Ten.”
The one thing missing from Beilein’s resume is a national title; of course you could argue now that Louisville has had to vacate the 2013 championship (another sign of the times), then that year’s runner-up, Michigan, ought to be viewed as at least the unofficial champs of that year.
Or you could just watch the Wolverines try to make a similar run to glory starting this week in the WMFA, playing Beilein Ball. That would work, too.