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:
“Telephone poles were matchsticks, put there to be snapped off at a whim. Dogs trotting across the road were suddenly big trucks. Old ladies turned into moving—vans. Everything was too bright, but very funny and made for my delight. And about half a mile from my long liquid breakfast I turned carefully down a side street and parked, and sat beaming happily through the tannic fog for about an hour, remembering how witty we all had been, how handsome and talented ... [ellipsis in original]”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“Ancient of days! august Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“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)
“Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)