When there was a whistle, or a commercial, you could get your bearings. It was then, and really, only then — when your eyes brushed against Mark Messier’s 11, Walt Frazier’s 10, Lou Carnesecca’s 526, or any Knicks or Rangers banner, unlikely to receive any more company anytime soon — that 33rd Street stopped feeling like it ran through the Rust Belt.
Michigan and Michigan State hadn’t come to New York. They had transported Madison Square Garden to the Midwest.
The Big Ten logos painted on the hardwood made the famous floor look indistinguishable from Chicago or Detroit or Indianapolis. The seats were a collage of maize and blue, and green and white, and empty ones were simply the result of hunger, or nature, calling.
It was a matchup the Big Ten Tournament craved, a rivalry that provided the most physical contest of the event, and ended with fifth-seeded Michigan defeating top-seeded Michigan State, 75-64, in front of a sellout crowd of 19,812 at Saturday afternoon’s semifinals.
It was the first sold-out Big Ten Tournament session in four years.
“Incredible atmosphere here at Madison Square Garden — played in the Big East championship game before, and this has every element that you could ever want, and even more because of Michigan-Michigan State being here,” Wolverines coach John Beilein said. “A great idea. …
Anybody that attended the game today knew it was well worth it for us to make this trip.”
If the final score was a surprise — the defending tournament champion Wolverines had previously slapped around the No. 2 team in the nation on the road in January — little else was.
In the first five minutes, two minor scuffles broke out, and Michigan State’s Nick Ward picked up a technical foul. Bodies repeatedly crashed to the court because minds were willing to do whatever would keep them here for one more day. The Spartans attacked the glass as if every offensive rebound were the last one that would be available. The Wolverines shot the 3 like it was worth 4.
It was East Lansing, and it was Ann Arbor, and whatever play seemed to swing momentum elicited a reaction as loud as St. John’s or Seton Hall or Syracuse could generate. In this disfigured college landscape, they belonged as much as Xavier or Butler or Creighton or DePaul or Marquette — aka half the Big East — and continued the tradition of making the Garden feel like no other venue.
It confirmed the only flaw in Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany’s plan to bring the tournament to New York was in the execution. He admitted the mistake this week, trying to expand the brand of the league at the expense of the teams in the league.
By playing the conference tournament this week — the Big East Tournament has a contract to play at the Garden during championship week, through 2026 — Big Ten schools were forced to play compacted schedules, and the top teams will have an unusually lengthy rest of more than a week before the NCAA Tournament begins. Delany said he wouldn’t do it this was again, and despite a desire to return to the Garden, the league faces future competition from the ACC, which still seeks to bring its tournament to Manhattan.
“I think everybody knows from a coaching standpoint this way a tough year the way everything was condensed, but once you got to Madison Square Garden, the thrill of playing an arena like this was special,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said. “The way this place was alive. … The memory of playing here will be important to our guys as they go through life.”
Outside, the city largely shrugged because that’s what New York does, barely even acknowledging the Super Bowl was at MetLife Stadium a few years ago. It’s part of the beauty, the lucky and unappreciated reality of something spectacular always happening in town.
This week was the Big Ten’s turn. Next year, and most years thereafter, the tournament will return to its geographic roots, but this fling produced the intended results — an exciting, and unique, experience.