St. John's routs Virginia to shake off double-overtime loss to Baylor
St. John's head coach Rick Pitino reacts during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game against Wagner Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in New York. Credit: AP/Adam Hunger
NASSAU, Bahamas — How would St. John’s respond to Thursday night’s gut-punch loss at the buzzer in double overtime to Baylor?
Pretty darn well.
RJ Luis Jr. scored 18 points and Kadary Richmond added 12 as No. 22 St. John’s blew out Virginia, 80-55, in the consolation game of the Baha Mar Hoops Championship on Friday night.
The Red Storm (5-1) will play one more game in the Bahamas, Sunday against Georgia, before returning home.
Deivon Smith scored 10 points, had 10 rebounds and eight assists.
The Caribbean trip has brought out the best in St. John’s shooters. A night after knocking down 14 shots from three-point range against Baylor, the Red Storm stayed hot, canning 10 of 24 from beyond the arc. Six St. John’s players connected for a trey on the night.
Friday, Rick Pitino’s team played without sophomore wing Brady Dunlap (back), but Richmond and Zuby Ejiofor, who both dealt with cramping issues Thursday, were a full-go.
Ejiofor, who missed two late free throws to open the door for Baylor’s Jeremy Roach to sink the game-winning trey on Thursday, took the court in pregame warmups to an exuberant “Zuby” chant from the Red Storm fans in attendance.
He scored eight points and grabbed nine rebounds and heard the crowd cheer his name again as he walked off the court after the win.
As it did against the Bears, the Red Storm charged out to a big first-half lead. This time, it didn’t let up.
The grind of two extra periods didn’t appear to have any ill-effects on the Red Storm.
Any question about its energy level vanished with Luis’ spinning fast-break dunk for the team’s first basket. St. John’s jumped out to a nine-point lead, getting five early points from Simeon Wilcher off the bench.
Then, after the Cavaliers made it a three-point game, St. John’s took over.
The Red Storm used a 16-0 run, fueled by six Virginia turnovers, to open up a 35-16 lead with 3:01 left before the break. St. John’s held UVA scoreless for a stretch of over seven minutes.
The second half simply saw it run away from the Cavaliers, leading by as many as 29.
Virginia (3-2), on the other hand, appeared to learn nothing from its opening-game loss to Tennessee, again being over-reliant on three-point shots and turnover prone offensively. Defensively, the normally stout Cavaliers looked lost in the halfcourt and two steps behind St. John’s in transition.
Of its 45 shots, UVA attempted 28 of them from beyond the arc. It committed 16 turnovers
Playing under interim coach Ron Sanchez, a native Dominican who grew up in the Bronx, Virginia suffered back-to-back 20-point losses for the first time since 2010. That year, in former coach Tony Bennett’s second season leading the program, it got dumped 81-60 at Stanford, then drilled 106-63 by Washington at the Maui Invitational.
