As for his team’s status at this point, Boeheim said the Orange — losers of four of their final six games after a 25-0 start — weren’t in a slump.
“I don’t think our team’s ever been in a slump,” he said. “I think without Jerami Grant we certainly weren’t as good as we’d like to be. I think we played pretty consistently all year. There’s a couple games where we didn’t shoot as well as we’d like, but every team in the country loses games. Just virtually every team loses two, three games. Sometimes when you’re schedule gets really hard, and that’s what happened to us. Overall,we played consistently well all year.”
Brey, a former Duke assistant and native of Rockville, Md., said he grew up as a big fan of the ACC Tournament and recalls listening as a 10th-grader on his transistor radio during school. He said he will miss playing in New York this week but is trying to education his players on the history of the ACC Tournament.
“I’m thinking I’m getting on a plane this afternoon and I’m not going to New York City,” Brey said, adding he’ll miss “my little Italian deli around the corner” from the Dumont Hotel.
Still, he said he told his players that the ACC Tournament is “twice as old as the Big East Tournament, that’s how long this thing’s been going.”
Going in as the No. 13 seed, he said he told his players, “Let’s win our first ACC Tournament game in our first year in the ACC and then let’s go back to the hotel and talk about who we face next.”
Pitt’s Dixon, whose No. 5-seeded team faces the Notre Dame/Wake Forest winner in the quarters, sounded somewhere between Brey’s excitement and Boeheim’s indifference.
“When you talk about tournaments as far as college basketball, the Big East and the ACC have always been the standard-bearers,” Dixon said. “It’s always been more important than the conference championships.
“The tournament’s always had this tradition of being more important in the Big East and it’s the same thing as I’ve seen in the ACC.”
As for Boeheim, he doesn’t feel the need to educate his players about the history of the ACC Tournament the way Brey does.
“The players know they’re in a big-time tournament,” he said, “a really big-time tournament and that’s really all the education that I think they need.”
ACC TOURNAMENT SCHEDULE (Courtesy Post-Standard)
FIRST ROUND (Wednesday)
- No. 12 Wake Forest (16-15, 6-12 ACC) vs. No. 13 Notre Dame (15-16, 6-12), 1 p.m.
- No. 10 Miami (16-15, 7-11) vs. No. 15 Virginia Tech (9-21, 2-16), 3:30 p.m.
- No. 11 Georgia Tech (15-16, 6-12) vs. No. 14 Boston College (8-23, 4-14), 7 p.m.
SECOND ROUND (Thursday)
- No. 8 Maryland (17-14, 9-9) vs. No. 9 Florida State (18-12, 9-9), noon
- No. 5 Pittsburgh (23-8, 11-7) vs. Wake Forest/Notre Dame, 2:30 p.m.
- No. 7 North Carolina State (19-12, 9-9) vs. Miami/Virginia Tech, 7 p.m.
- No. 6 Clemson (19-11, 10-8) vs. Georgia Tech/Boston College, 9:30 p.m.
QUARTERFINALS (Friday)
- No. 1 Virginia (25-6, 16-2) vs. Florida State/Maryland, noon
- No. 4 North Carolina (23-8, 13-5) vs. Pittsburgh/Wake Forest/Notre Dame, 2:30 p.m.
- No. 2 Syracuse (27-4, 14-4) vs. N.C. State/Miami/Virginia Tech, 7 p.m.
- No. 3 Duke (24-7, 13-5) vs. Clemson/Georgia Tech/Boston College, 9:30 p.m.
SEMIFINALS (Saturday)
- First two quarterfinal winners, 1 p.m.
- Last two quarterfinal winners, 3:30 p.m.
FINAL (Sunday)
- Semifinal winners, 1 p.m.