March Madness: Teams shaking hands after a game is a good thing . . . until it isn’t

BOSTON — All college basketball games have one thing in common, whether they occur in a tiny gym or a big domed stadium, in November or April. After the final buzzer, players on the two sides are expected to line up and shake hands in one of the sport’s most enduring, endearing and occasionally incendiary traditions.

The Handshake Line is a well documented staple in hockey’s Stanley Cup playoffs, occurring after the final game of each series. But the procedure is much more common in college basketball, taking on an especially poignant aspect in the NCAA Tournament because one of the teams always is done for the season.

Villanova coach Jay Wright, who has been on the winning side in three games so far in this year’s Big Dance, considers it an outgrowth of a feeling of “magic” for anyone who is in the tournament.

“I do enjoy that. By the time you get to this point, you know, you’ve had a great season. Even when you lose, you’re crushed but you know you’ve had a great year. So I just love telling the player how much you respect them,” Wright said Saturday at TD Garden, where the Wildcats will either be accepting or delivering congratulations after facing Texas Tech Sunday afternoon with a trip to the Final Four on the line.

Some people have criticized the practice, though, because of the potential for incidents. Emotions are raw right after a game and tempers can get short. Twice this season, Xavier games ended with flare-ups during the supposed sportsmanship ceremony: once against local rival Cincinnati, once in the Big East Tournament against St. John’s. Xavier was not widely accused of being at fault either time, but the episodes demonstrated that it does not take much for the handshakes to overshadow 40 minutes of basketball.

Feelings were roiled after Kansas State upset Kentucky in a Sweet 16 game Thursday night. Some Kansas State players believed Kentucky had disrespected them by not shaking hands. Kentucky coach John Calipari said in his news conference after the game that he did shake hands with Bruce Weber, his counterpart, but that he and his team walked off when they saw that the winners had run into the stands to celebrate with fans.

“I had no disrespect for anything, just that they were celebrating and I was happy for them,” Calipari said.

The issue carried into the following day’s news conference for Kansas State, at which one player, Barry Brown Jr., said: “I think we were just cheering too much and didn’t really get kind of organized to be able to get in that line and shake their hands.”

Most times, the mood is more like the one Villanova’s Mikal Bridges portrayed in discussing the average very brief conversation: “Just, ‘Great season, way to play.’ They say the same thing back.” When you’re on the winning side, he added, it takes on an empathetic quality, “We’ve been through it before. Last season ended for us early. You tell them, ‘You’ve just got to keep your head up. There’s a lot more left in your career.’ ”

Texas Tech’s Niem Stevenson said that after his team’s win over Purdue here Friday night, the goodwill went beyond the handshake line. “[Carsen] Edwards from Purdue. It was really cool he came to the locker room afterward. He just showed respect. That was a big-time moment. I won’t forget that,” he said. “He went up to everybody and said, ‘Good game.’ ”

Wright never will forget how gracious Oklahoma State coach Eddie Sutton was to him at his first NCAA Tournament game with Hofstra. “He said, ‘You do a really good job. Your team is well coached,’ ” the current Villanova coach said. “That was it. I was good. That kind of stuff, it really resonates. If I can ever do that for somebody, it’s always nice.”