March Madness: Don't bet against St. John's coach Rick Pitino's experience and Red Storm's resilience

The question about St. John’s at the beginning of the season is the question being posed now in the wake of the NCAA Tournament field being announced: What are the Red Storm going to be?

The first time it was posed, few probably would have answered that they’d be the Big East champion, a No. 2 seed in The Big Dance and a team with a 30-4 record and four losses by a total of seven points.

Now it’s been asked again. Put a ceiling on them at your own peril.

St. John's, which will open the NCAA Tournament in a West Region first-round game against Omaha (22-12) on Thursday night in Providence, Rhode Island, has proved to be a team that consistently overcomes everything in its way. The Red Storm fall behind in a game, they are resourceful enough to find a way to win anyway. They shoot poorly from outside the three-point arc or at the free-throw line (or both), they do other things to compensate for it.

Each time he speaks about playing in the NCAA Tournament, coach Rick Pitino likes to remind everyone that his teams “have lost in the first round.” But the truth is: really not that much.

Yes, the three times he’s brought teams from one-bid conferences — Boston University once and Iona twice — there were quick exits. When he’s taken teams that came out of strong conferences — such as this St. John’s team that comes from a five-bid Big East — he’s won at least one game 70% of the time.

Of eight Pitino-coached teams awarded a No. 1 or No. 2 seed, seven won three tournament games. And it’s been well-chronicled that he coached in seven Final Fours and won two national championships.

The NCAA Tournament is a place where Pitino thrives. Before the NCAA Tournament Selection Show was over, he already was poring over statistics about Summit Conference champion Omaha. When asked at the post-show news conference how soon he and his staff would begin crafting a plan of attack, he replied, “Right after I leave here.”

The first step: “We'll look more [at] their league — the league knows them the best, so we'll look at how the league defended them . . . and we'll see what they do.”

Sadiku Ibine Ayo followed Pitino to St. John’s from Iona after the Gaels made the 2023 NCAA Tournament (and led eventual national champion Connecticut at halftime before falling). He saw the way Pitino changed after Iona won the Metro Atlantic championship and moved into March Madness.

Few St. John’s players have NCAA Tournament experience, and Pitino wanted them as ready as possible. So he made the regular-season finale at Marquette and the Big East Tournament feel like NCAA Tournament games for the Red Storm.

“What I did with the Marquette game, with four minutes to go in this tight ballgame, I said, “OK, this is the first round of the NCAA Tournament and you’ve got four minutes to get a win, survive and advance, or you're going home,’” Pitino said. “And then in the Big East Tournament, I went to 32 and the Sweet 16 and the Final Four, putting as much pressure as [I] could on the basketball team to relive what they're going to possibly experience in the next week.”

Ibine Ayo, who knows the NCAA Tournament version of Pitino, confirmed that the team witnessed that version of him and that experience from the games.

“It's that we took the Big East Tournament like an NCAA Tournament,” he said. “He coached us different, just like he did during the [2023] tournament. You're going to see the same type of Coach P throughout all these games.”

“He's like a different monster, just his level of intensity. It's like it heightens,” RJ Luis Jr. said. “Coach P was already looking over the statistics to see what he could come up with. He's really just a master at his craft and he's going to do the best he can with his abilities to put us in a position to be successful.”

A different kind of monster? So what exactly does that look like?

“I'm not gonna lie, we have a lot of fun in practice, laughing, joking and playing all day long,” Deivon Smith said. “Some of that might have to cut out a little bit right now, you know, just dial it all in, lock in and it’s win-or-go-home.”

St. John’s is playing its best basketball of the season — what Pitino said would be the goal from the very start — and it isn’t going to have the familiarity with opponents that it had with the Big East foes.

If the Red Storm get past Omaha, they will be pitted against either Bill Self and Kansas or John Calipari and Arkansas. And those two coaches have as much familiarity with the NCAA Tournament as Pitino does.

Yes, challenges are ahead for St. John’s, but that's been true all season. There’s no reason to think the Red Storm aren't up to them.

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.