Now that UConn is no longer in the Big East Conference, the Huskies aren’t guaranteed any games at Madison Square Garden.
No regular-season games against St. John’s, no six-overtime thrillers against Syracuse in the Big East Tournament.
But coach Kevin Ollie wants his club — now in the American Athletic Conference — to take advantage of any chance it gets to play at New York’s most famous arena.
“Whenever we have the opportunity to schedule a game down there, we’ll be down there in the mecca of basketball,” Ollie said Monday on a conference call. “We are always going to try and schedule a game down in New York or two.”
The No. 18 Huskies (4-0) will play Boston College (1-3) Thursday night at MSG in the 2K Sports Classic, and will then meet either Indiana or Washington in Friday’s championship game. The losers will play in the consolation game.
The games will provide another homecoming for sophomore guard Omar Calhoun of Brooklyn, freshman guard Terrence Samuel of Brooklyn and freshman forward Kentan Facey, who played at Long Island Lutheran.
The trio was just here Nov. 8 when UConn held off Maryland, 78-77, at the Barclays Center.
Ollie also said he wants to keep the UConn-BC rivalry going even though one team is in the American and the other is the ACC. The two teams used to have a fierce rivalry in the Big East, but haven’t played since 2005 when BC jumped ship to the ACC.
“It’s a great team right in our region here and we had a lot of wars in the Big East,” Ollie said. “I remember a lot of them when I played at the University of Connecticut. We’d like to rekindle that rivalry again.”
