In New York, the ACC tournament lives in the shadow of the league it decimated
About 30 minutes before Florida State’s game against Syracuse in the ACC tournament here on Wednesday, a lone Florida State fan crossed a street near the Barclays Center, a retro-looking garnet and gold pullover with SEMINOLES to shield him from the cold and wet of a particularly disagreeable March day.
It was an ACC basketball fan in the wild, notable for no other reason than the fact that outside the very arena where the second day of the tournament was about to begin, there wasn’t much of an indication that it was happening. There were no lines anywhere. No scalpers hawking tickets, and only one or two asking if anyone had any for sale.
There was the lone Florida State fan, and a few wearing Syracuse orange. And, well — that was about it. Otherwise, people hustled into the subway station nearby, and out of it, and walked past the arena on the way to somewhere else. There was an office to get to, perhaps, or maybe the Chick-fil-A across from the arena, or Shake Shack, or even the Target.
The Barclays Center is surrounded by places to go; places to eat or shop or be entertained, and in this particular part of Brooklyn the arena is supposed to be the epicenter of it all — the place to be. Yet so far in this ACC tournament, it has been a building begging for company. The ACC tournament is back in New York, and the same old questions remain from when it was here the first two times, in 2017 and ‘18:
Does anybody notice? Does anybody care? And with the Big East Tournament a 25-minute subway ride away, in a more iconic venue and a more lively part of the city, how does the ACC avoid the apparent inevitability of playing second fiddle to the conference it decimated in the early rounds of conference expansion and realignment?
Consider the scene inside the Barclays Center early Wednesday afternoon. Yes, it was a noon game. Yes, neither Syracuse nor Florida State have been particularly good this season; neither one entered the postseason with any sort of realistic NCAA tournament hopes. Even so, Syracuse is often branded as New York City’s college team (questionable, given the history and proximity of St. John’s, but no matter) and this is the ACC tournament, long a historic event of its own.
Yet there were not just good seats available for the Syracuse-Florida State game, which Syracuse won with little difficulty. And there were not just good rows available, either. There were several good sections available, entire swaths of empty seats, each one representing someone who was not there. Or, in this case, thousands upon thousands of someones.
So empty was the Barclays that the presence of people, or even a single person, sometimes appeared jarring in a landscape of dark, upright seat cushions. Up in section 223, which overlooks midcourt high above the floor, Mike McGivney sat alone more than halfway high in the upper deck. It was as though he was on a small raft in a vast ocean of apathy.
“These are my seats, officially,” McGivney, 62, said as he stood up, seeking refuge — or perhaps less isolation. A longtime Syracuse fan, McGivney was decked out in gear representing the Orange. He’d been to three Big East Tournaments back when Syracuse played in that conference, and McGivney considered the comparison between the Big East Tournament, played in Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City, and the Brooklyn version of the ACC tournament.
“Well, McGivney said, pausing as if he didn’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities. “It’s better in Manhattan.”
Then he struck a hopeful tone: “These are the early rounds. Once the later rounds get here it’ll be more filled, and Friday and Saturday will definitely be packed.”
True enough, the ACC tournament could only go up from here. Thursday began the quarterfinal round, and featured the debuts of Duke and North Carolina, which both finished in the top four of the regular season standings and thus earned a double-bye. It’s possible the Blue Devils and Tar Heels could meet Saturday night in the league championship game, which would help solve some of the indifference the ACC faces in Brooklyn.
Even the prospect of a Duke-UNC final, though, feels like a band-aid. The ACC’s problem in Brooklyn goes deeper than match-ups, and the relative lack of attractive ones in what has been one of the conference’s worst seasons in memory. More than that, the problem is cultural.
Syracuse fans, of which we have been told there are many in and around New York, didn’t even come Wednesday to see their team in the ACC tournament. It’s not a stretch to suggest there’d have been more of them for a Big East Tournament game in the Garden, given the school’s history there. Chris Pollone, like McGivney, was among those who did decide to make the trip to the Barclays Center, though he sensed something was off on the train ride over to the arena.
“When I was coming down here on the 4 train, there were just two other dudes in orange on the train,” he said. “And I was really surprised by that.”
Pollone, a journalist with NBC News, was also sitting in the upper deck, in a section overlooking one of the baskets, and he and a friend were the only two people in that particular section. The ACC and the Barclays Center had the curtains drawn on the upper deck during the Tuesday games, and that was hardly surprising given that even when the tournament is in North Carolina the those games are always an afterthought. Wednesday is when it’s supposed to start to pick up.
It didn’t, though. Not in Brooklyn. Not for the early session and not for the later one.
Meanwhile, the Big East Tournament, much like the ACC’s, is not what it was. The membership has changed. College basketball has, too. Yet Madison Square Garden felt alive, still, during the conference’s first round tournament games on Wednesday. These were the games, too, that were supposed to be the least attractive of the event, similar to ACC tournament Tuesday.
Even so, the Garden was more full than not Wednesday night for St. John’s victory against DePaul, and at times the place even became loud, the atmosphere rising above the circumstances. There was no great reason for anyone to care all that much about a game between a 16-14 team (St. John’s) and a 15-15 team (DePaul), but tradition dictated that it mattered — well, that and the fact that the Garden is St. John’s second home.
Beyond that, though, the game mattered because in New York City the Big East Tournament still matters. All around the Garden there were reminders of its relationship with the event, the history. The conference is celebrating 40 years of Big East Tournaments here, and the spectacle of it all has survived even if the original iteration of the conference has not.
There’s an irony, now, in the dynamic between the ACC and Big East tournaments, which are happening not all that far from each other but in some ways are a world apart. Almost 20 years ago now, the ACC hastened the demise of the original Big East when it lured Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech away from that conference and into the ACC. Then, about 10 years ago, the ACC further scavenged the Big East when it plucked Pittsburgh and Syracuse away.
When Maryland left the ACC for the Big Ten, which league did the ACC turn toward to find a replacement? It was the Big East. Louisville had joined that conference only after the ACC’s original plundering of it and then Louisville left, too, when given the opportunity. The ACC grew more powerful, and wealthier, while the Big East was left to reinvent itself as a non-football-playing conference — its basketball tournament in the Garden one of the few ties to the past.
Earlier this week, on Monday, the ACC participated in a public relations event to promote its tournament’s presence in Brooklyn. The conference sent out a press release about it, the subject of the email written in all capital letters: BROOKLYN BOROUGH PRESIDENT ANTONIO REYNOSO TO PROCLAIM MARCH 7-12 AS ACC TOURNAMENT WEEK IN BROOKLYN. It was as if it was big news, as if to say:
Well, folks — the tournament matters here now. The Brooklyn Borough president has decreed it so.
The Big East and New York City, meanwhile, don’t feel the need for a similar sort of formal designation. In the Garden, the Big East Tournament simply exists, part of the building’s past. No one needs to say it’s Big East Tournament Week for anyone to know what it represents there.
Though hardly scientific, tickets sold on the secondary market speak to that reality, too. On StubHub, tickets for Big East’s Thursday night session were no cheaper than $118 by late Wednesday night, and the next cheapest were around $150. Tickets for the ACC’s same Thursday night session, meanwhile, were going for $17.
These days, the financial realities of both conferences suggest they operate in different economic stratospheres and that’s true, to an extent. The Big East generated $58.7 million in revenue during the 2019-20 tax year, according to publicly-available tax data. The ACC generated nearly 8.5 times more than that — $496.7 million. At their respective basketball tournaments on Wednesday, though, the less well-off conference offered a much richer scene.
Walking into the Garden felt like walking into an event. There was an energy. It didn’t lack for empty seats, either, but the people who came were loud. It felt part like a watch party for a game and part like a celebration of the past.
In Brooklyn, meanwhile, the ACC tournament feels like an awkward gesture to appease the schools that used to play in the Garden every year around this time. For those old Big East schools, though, the reception and environment in Barclays Center is hardly what they grew to know in the Garden. Nor is it what the league’s other schools know about ACC tournaments in North Carolina, or even Washington, D.C.
At 11:30 Wednesday night at the Garden, the crowd was still formidable for an old-school Big East match-up between Georgetown and Seton Hall. The song “Poison” thumped over the speakers during a timeout in the second half, and some people stood and danced. The place still rocked at the sight of a highlight play. There was still plenty of life. Financially, the conference might be more than $400 million behind the ACC but that hardly mattered now. Some things, money can’t buy.
This story was originally published March 10, 2022 at 8:03 AM.
