The basketball Big East still has its claim staked with the Big East Tournament. The Big Ten is trying to work its way in there with (*cough*, *snortle*) Rutgers joining and being a part of the Pinstripe Bowl. The American… Okay they quit and are going to Memphis for their tournament.

Then there is the ACC. Having their “Welcome to the ACC” event for Pitt, Syracuse and Notre Dame in NYC was yet another signal that the ACC is making a push for their place in NYC.

To ACC-centric beat writers this was a particularly overt and direct move.

This was the ACC like we’ve never seen. Lobster-on-crostini hors d’oeuvres and piped-in-jazz overlooking Times Square rather than barbecue, hush puppies and Kenny Chesney out yonder. An aggressive, confident marketing campaign instead of the staid, traditional odes to the past.

All to mark Monday’s official arrival of Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame to the conference. All to transparently proclaim the ACC is in the big city to stay.

Oh, there were down-home touches such as sending the 15 schools’ mascots to the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty. But Monday’s rollout was more Gordon Gekko than Bones McKinney, more single-malt than sweet tea, complete with the Twitter hashtag “#ACCtakesNYC.”

The only thing missing was ACC graffiti at Penn Station.

In short, this is business, kids, and the league wisely intends to do “bidness” in New York.

“This is a very prominent city from a media standpoint, from a sports standpoint, that has not been in our footprint,” Commissioner John Swofford said during an afternoon news conference at the NASDAQ stock exchange. “It is now, as of today, and we want to treat it with the appropriate level of importance we think it brings.”

If you think Swofford was being subtle about saying that the ACC is looking at NYC as in their market area, well…

“We wanted to showcase the Atlantic Coast Conference in New York City and to show that this is a very important part of our new footprint,” ACC commissioner John Swofford said.

The Big East and Big Ten could reasonably view that statement as meaning: shots fired.

Now one of the best ways to really make a claim to NYC is to get the ACC Basketball Tournament up there. Something more and more of the basketball coaches in the ACC (not just the ones coming from the Big East) are backing.

Regardless, ACC coaches prefer MSG, and sources said they voiced that opinion forcefully during the league’s annual May meetings.

“If we go to Madison Square Garden, it will be the greatest exposure we’ve ever gotten as a league in the New York metropolitan area, where the recruiting ground is very fertile,” Miami coach and New York native Jim Larranaga told me last season. “Playing in the Mecca of college basketball, Madison Square Garden, is a thrill for every college player.”

As a player at Providence, Larranaga competed in the 1968 Holiday Festival at the Garden against No. 1 UCLA and Holy Cross.

“It’s not just coaches from the Northeast,” North Carolina State coach Mark Gottfried told the ACC Digital Network. “When you look at a strategy of staking a claim that you are the best basketball league, you can’t replace the Garden and the media market of New York City. …

“I would like to see it happen. I like being in North Carolina. I like playing it one hour away. Selfishly, for me, it’s better to be in Greensboro. But I think all of us in the league, we have to look out for what’s best for the league. … I want to recruit the best players in the country, not just along the eastern seaboard. New York can change that. Being on that platform, on that stage, could potentially be something very strong for the ACC.”

Greensboro has the ACC Tournament for two more years. The Big East still has a new contract with MSG that — so far — everyone says will be honored. Of course, this is business so much can change.

Cynically I can see the A-10 being screwed one way or another. If Madison Square Garden exercises some contract option to get out of the Big East deal in a couple years, Barclays would probably work very hard to snag the Big East — either by completely trying to void the deal with the A-10 or by forcing the A-10 to have their tournament a week earlier.

Or if the ACC goes to Barclays, then a similar thing would still happen to the A-10.

The hang-up for an ACC-MSG (or Barclays) deal will likely be the commitment. The ACC still seems hesitant to make a full commitment to one location for several years. Both NYC-area venues are going to demand at least a three-year run (if not five).

But of course there has to be some hand-wringing. This is change after all and someone has to stand athwart progress and scream, “halt!”

And since the ACC is southern based, let’s do it with NASCAR parallels.

The ACC spent Monday gallivanting about New York in an eerie echo of a similar expedition made by NASCAR in June 2003, when Nextel replaced Winston as title sponsor. Ditching tobacco for telecommunications in Times Square neatly summed up the changes the stock-car circuit underwent as it morphed from regional pastime to national product.

A decade later, NASCAR continues to benefit from that growth as well as deal with its consequences, from declining television ratings to empty grandstands. It’s a cautionary tale for the ACC, a league now so sprawling that it ditched the ACC seal logo that once marked the location of all members on a simple map of the East Coast. Simple cartography can no longer contain it.

“The ACC and NASCAR kind of parallel each other in a lot of ways,” said Humpy Wheeler, the former president of Charlotte Motor Speedway and a longtime observer of both organizations. “The ACC was regional and has become national, and certainly that’s what NASCAR did. The whole reason for going to New York, of course, was to take advantage of that national media. It actually worked. It got NASCAR more publicity on that announcement than any announcement for a sponsorship that I’m aware of.”

With the official addition Monday of Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame, the ACC is mimicking NASCAR’s attempts to capitalize on its increasing popularity outside the South by leaving places like North Wilkesboro and Rockingham while taking away the Labor Day weekend Southern 500 from Darlington.

This argument ended in 2004 when VT and Miami joined and the knowledge that BC was joining a year later. Actually this argument probably ended in 2003 when everyone thought that it would be Syracuse, Boston College and Miami in the ACC.

Hell, this column plays around with the tropes from 2003-2005 from opponents of ACC expansion in how it destroys its roots:

The Carolina schools, with help from Virginia and Georgia Tech and Maryland, made the league great with their proximity and shared basketball culture. By adding these Big East schools, with their own strong, shared basketball culture, the conference risks diluting, if not losing, the Tobacco Road heritage that made the ACC what it was in the first place. The ACC did a poor job of maintaining that identity through the first round of expansion, particularly because it was driven entirely by football. This latest round restores basketball to its proper place of primacy, but risks altering the league’s DNA the same way NASCAR did when it moved races around the country.

I’m guessing every other school not on Tobacco Road is cheering wildly at the idea that the ACC would no longer be tied to that North Carolina-centric heritage. I’m failing to see the downside.