March Madness: St. John's coach Rick Pitino has a big fan in former Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim

 PROVIDENCE, R.I.

The phone call was made exactly two years ago to the day on Thursday, and Jim Boeheim remembers it perfectly.

In New York, St. John’s was completing the deal to make Rick Pitino the coach of the Red Storm. In the Syracuse home of the legendary coach of the Orange, the telephone was ringing. He answered and instantly recognized the soft, gravelly voice of Lou Carnesecca.

“It was one of the greatest calls I’ve ever had,” Boeheim told Newsday. “I think it was the day Rick was being hired and Looie was maybe 98. And he said to me, ‘It’s going to be Rick — what do you think?’ ”

Boeheim’s reply: “I think you guys have hired a coach who’s going to get you there.”

“And then Looie said to me, ‘I think so too,’ ” Boeheim said. “It was a great phone call. And, you know, Looie called me every once in a while through the years and it was great. That was the last one.”

Boeheim and Carnesecca always had great intuition about basketball, and they weren’t wrong about the marriage of Pitino and the Red Storm. Two years to the day later (give or take five minutes), No. 2 St. John’s came on strong after halftime for its first NCAA Tournament win in 25 years, an 83-53 victory over No. 15 Omaha in a West Region first-round game at Amica Mutual Pavilion.

It the final minutes, the large and loud contingent of Red Storm fans chanted Pitino’s name.

“That’s who Coach Pitino is — he changes programs,” Zuby Ejiofor said. “That’s the character and the level of who he is as a person, as a coach. And . . . I’m ready for more memories with him.”

St. John’s (31-4) will face No. 10 Arkansas and one-time Pitino nemesis John Calipari on Saturday at 2:40 p.m.

Boeheim said he has watched St. John’s maybe 15 times this season and isn’t surprised that Pitino and this group of players have succeeded.

“[Carnesecca] and I talked about it and we both thought Rick would turn St. John’s around,” Boeheim said. “Rick’s the best coach at getting people to play together [and] play hard. And he doesn’t need a lot of superstars. He always got good players, but he literally won a national championship [at Louisville in 2013] with guys that weren’t recruited.”

Boeheim might be Pitino’s oldest friend in basketball circles. He had just been hired to be the head coach at Syracuse in 1976 when he arrived in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, where Pitino and his wife, Joanne, were going to spend their wedding night after the ceremony.

Boeheim and Pitino had met when both were teaching at Five Star Camp, and Boeheim was keen on how Pitino taught defense. He urgently called up to ask Pitino to meet him in the lobby.

Pitino agreed. Within hours, he not only was a member of the Syracuse coaching staff but was canceling his honeymoon to go to Cincinnati and recruit Louis Orr to the Orange.

Carnesecca and Boeheim had plenty of experience facing Pitino’s teams in the Big East when he was at Providence and later at Louisville.

“Rick develops players better than anybody — there’s no doubt about that,” Boeheim said. “He did that the two years he was with me [at Syracuse]. He was great at working with guys and pushing them. That’s what he does: He pushes people to be better.”

As for the timeline on St. John’s resurgence, Boeheim also was not surprised.

“I guess at Providence he turned it in two years from an abysmal program,” he said. “And he turned Louisville in two years and Kentucky in two years. That’s what it’s been in every place he’s [coached]. I think that’s one reason Looie and I agreed about him.”

As for this NCAA Tournament, Boeheim sees St. John’s as capable of making a deep run, though he said the Red Storm’s poor shooting could be their Achilles’ heel. As he put it, “They can beat anybody — if they make shots, they can beat them all.”

In Pitino’s estimation, it’s going to take more than just good shooting to take out the Razorbacks and get the Red Storm to their first Sweet 16 since their 1999 run to the Elite Eight.

“We’re going to have to play the best game of the season to beat a team like this — we know that,” Pitino said. “They’re very, very big [and] athletic. Their bench is athletic. They’re fast. This is a whole different ballgame for us, but they know we’re a good team as well.”

By Roger Rubin

roger.rubin@newsday.com@rogrubin

Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.