NIT Wrapped Up In About 5 Hours

NEW YORK—The 32-team field of the 2010 NIT took a businesslike attitude toward getting the tournament over with Wednesday, with participants entering Madison Square Garden at noon, hitting the showers around 5 p.m., and wrapping up the tournament’s 31 games in record time. “We were just looking to put this whole thing behind us,” head coach Rick Stansbury said of his victorious Mississippi State Bulldogs while charging out of the locker room and into the car he had left running outside. “The two-minute halves helped, obviously, but everyone did a great job of avoiding eye contact and playing basketball as fast as possible.” NIT officials expressed disappointment that they weren’t able to “get the whole thing down to a half hour, tops.”