The Big East Conference Men's Basketball Player of the Year award is given to the men's basketball player in the Big East Conference voted as the top performer by the conference coaches. The head coaches of the league's teams (currently 15) submit their votes following the end of the regular season and before the conference's tournament in early March. The coaches cannot vote for their own players.
The award was introduced following the conference's first season in 1980, in which it was presented to John Duren of Georgetown. Patrick Ewing, Richard Hamilton, and Troy Murphy each won the award twice, and Chris Mullin won three consecutive times from 1983 through 1985. Ewing, who shared the award in 1984 and 1985 with Mullin, was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 after playing 17 years in the National Basketball Association between 1985 and 2002. Mullin was inducted into the Naismith Hall in 2011 after a 16-year NBA career (1985–2001). There have been six ties; the most recent instance was that between DeJuan Blair of Pittsburgh and Hasheem Thabeet of Connecticut in 2009.
Three players have been awarded a national Player of the Year award in the same year that they received a Big East Player of the Year award. In 1985, Ewing and Mullin shared the conference award, while Ewing was named Naismith College Player of the Year and Mullin was given the John R. Wooden Award. The following year, Walter Berry received the Wooden Award and the Big East Player of the Year award. Connecticut and Georgetown have had the most winners, with seven each. As of 2012, nine of the conference's 16 current teams have had a winner. Providence is the only original 1979 member to not have a winner, while Rutgers is the only other current member—aside from the schools added in the 2005 expansion—without a winner. West Virginia also did not have a winner during its tenure as a full Big East member from 1995 to 2012. As of 2012, the award has been given 39 times in 33 seasons. Thirty-three players from 11 schools have received the award: 18 seniors, 13 juniors, eight sophomores, and no freshmen.
Read more about Big East Conference Men's Basketball Player Of The Year: Key, Winners, Winners By School
Famous quotes containing the words big, east, conference, men, basketball, player and/or year:
“Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead.”
—Cherrie Moraga (b. 1952)
“Before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to resort to the north- east side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Politics is still the man’s game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then—but only occasionally—one is present at some secret conference or other. But it’s not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“The root of the discontent in American women is that they are too well educated.... There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.”
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)