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:
“...deep down, deeper than everyday gets me, I am still one of them and will be till I die. In my heart and soul I belong to the lot and the red wagons and the Big Top.”
—Josephine Demott Robinson (1865–1948)
“The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football’s place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)
“A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“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)
“That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing—the truly democratic thing about it—is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!
For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)