Soon after Myles Powell accepted his Big East Player of the Year award on Wednesday afternoon at Madison Square Garden, the Seton Hall star was informed of his newest reality: the NCAA Tournament would be held without fans.
Ever the competitor, Powell vowed to fight on — with or without fans.
“You gotta go out there and play,” he said. “We still know that we’re one of the top seeds and we’re still going to get everybody’s best shot, fans in there or not. For you to move on, you gotta win and I’m not trying to have my senior year end early so I know for sure I’m going to have my guys ready and I don’t care if we gotta play outside in the park. I mean, we’re gonna be ready.”
Now there is another new reality for Powell: he has played his final game in a Seton Hall uniform. The NCAA Tournament and the Big East Tournament were both canceled Thursday, so Powell’s storied Seton Hall career is over.
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He and his teammates won’t have a chance to compete for the program’s second Big East Tournament title since 2016, or reach the program’s first Final Four since 1989.
Even before the NCAA announced the cancellation of its tournament, all the major sports leagues were expected to shut down and prominent names like Charles Barkley, Mike Francesa and Jay Bilas were calling for the suspension of the NCAA Tournament. Duke and Kansas had already announced they wouldn’t participate if there was a tournament.
As it turns out, Powell and his fellow seniors, Romaro Gill and Quincy McKnight, played their final game in a Seton Hall uniform in last Sunday’s loss at Creighton.
“It’s definitely tough, not just Seton Hall, for all the guys that work hard to be able to be into the field of [68], is definitely tough, especially for seniors, it’s their last go-around,” Terry Dehere, the Big East Player of the Year in 1993, told NJ Advance Media by phone.
“But on the flip side, you can see that when it comes to humans and health and the crisis that we’re dealing with, that as much as we love the game of basketball, it is a secondary item that we have to deal with,” Dehere added. “It puts everything in perspective.”
Rutgers hasn’t been in the NCAA Tournament since 1991 and now its players like Ron Harper Jr., Geo Baker and Myles Johnson will never get to enjoy the fruits of a historic season that almost surely would have put them in the field.
“Yeah, that’s just horrible,” Dehere said. “It’s unfortunate but would you rather play in the tournament and not have a life of fulfillment and enjoyment where you know you can live comfortably for the next 40-50 years without a virus? I would love to watch the NCAA basketball, but when you look at the big picture, how many people would probably be infected by the virus if all the people came together?
"It’s like a traveling band, if one teams wins and goes to another region, everyone follows. You don’t know if that’s actually going to help spread the virus in those types of situations. Until we can figure out how to contain this, hopefully we can figure out in the next couple of weeks where it doesn’t hurt the NCAA Tournament.”
UConn coach Dan Hurley, the former St. Anthony’s and Seton Hall standout, was in Fort Worth, Texas, when the American Athletic Conference Tournament was canceled.
He said the experience was “surreal” and said his primary focus at that point was getting his players on a plane and safely back to Connecticut.
“You do get robbed of the opportunity to walk off the court with the people you've gone to battle with one last time,” Hurley said.
Powell is set to graduate from Seton Hall on May 18 at Prudential Center.
He will become the first person in his family to graduate from college. But he and all the other players finishing college have been robbed of that one last opportunity to go to battle on the court.
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Adam Zagoria is a freelance reporter who covers Seton Hall and NJ college basketball for NJ Advance Media.