Is St. John's tough enough? We'll find out against Seton Hall

We’re all about to get a better idea of what this St. John’s team is made of.

The Red Storm have shown themselves to be many things over the first 17 games: dedicated in adopting coach Rick Pitino’s defense-first philosophy, self-sacrificing in surrendering their ‘go-to guy’ reputations to defer to others, determined in a shared desire to restore St. John’s. The list goes on.

Now Pitino has challenged his team to be tougher — twice.

He did it after St. John’s survived a comeback to beat Providence last Wednesday. And he did it again Saturday after the one-point loss at Creighton.

So Tuesday’s 8:30 p.m. Big East matchup against upstart Seton Hall at Prudential Center shapes up as a character test.

“His message was basically we weren’t tough enough to win that game on the road,” Daniss Jenkins said Monday.

The Red Storm (12-5, 4-2) will need grit to beat the Pirates (12-5, 5-1), a team coaches picked ninth in the preseason poll that now sits in a first-place tie with wins over three nationally ranked opponents.

“I’m really eager to see how we respond to a team that plays really, really hard like Seton Hall does,” Jenkins said. “They’ve got a lot of dogs on their team. They play hard, and when I was watching the film, I kind of said to myself, ‘We need to show that we can play that way.’

“Seton Hall? Every game they’re the aggressor — I think that’s why they come out on top all the time. They’re always tough, [and] the tougher team always wins. And we need to come out and show that we can be tough and we can come out with a tough win.”

In the locker room after Saturday’s loss, Jenkins told teammates he should bear the blame. St. John’s had a one-point lead when Creighton missed a shot with 17 seconds left, and he had the defensive rebound in his grasp before Bluejays center Ryan Kalkbrenner demolished him. Trey Alexander ended up with a pair of free throws for the lead and St. John’s missed two shots for the win on the last possession.

“I think I’m a tough guy, I think our team is tough and I just don’t think I showed it on that play, regardless of what happened,” Jenkins said. “[If] he took my leg out, I’ve still got to come up with the ball. I did take blame because I felt like if I would have got that rebound, we would have won the game.”

Maybe so, but the truth is it didn’t have to come down to that. To that end, Pitino worked them on the flight home. Jenkins said he summoned each player, showed him video and discussed correctable errors.

“When we lost to UConn . . . it was the same thing: We gave up an offensive rebound at the end of the game and we lost a game we felt we should have won,” Jenkins said. “It wasn’t all that one rebound. There were a lot of things that went wrong through that stretch that led up to that rebound, [and] even though we did all those wrong things, we still could have come up with that last rebound and got out of there with the win.

“We just we can’t be in those situations and, if we are, we’ve just got to come up with the rebound.”

After facing Seton Hall, St. John’s has Saturday’s Garden meeting with No. 17 Marquette. Given that their only conference losses are to now-No. 1-ranked UConn and now-No. 18-ranked Creighton by a total of five points, it feels as if the Red Storm can make a breakthrough. Maybe Pitino’s call for toughness will spark it.

“We should come out with more passion, more grit, more hunger — play every possession like . . . it’s our last,” Jenkins said. “That’s what you should see different: just a little more urgency to each possession and playing with a lot more passion, a lot more heart and determination.”

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.