When things were falling apart for Providence earlier this season and there were questions about Ed Cooley’s coaching acumen, I kept coming back to the fact that the 2018 Big East Championship game was not that long ago. It just didn’t seem likely that Cooley could have forgotten how to coach less than two years removed from an overtime loss to the eventual national champions from Villanova — a group starting four future NBA players, with a fifth coming off of the bench.
The 2018 Big East Tournament may have been the best coaching performance of Cooley’s Providence tenure.