For St. John's coach Rick Pitino, huge comebacks are nothing new
Louisville head coach Rick Pitino celebrates in the final moments of the Cardinals' victory over the West Virginia Mountaineers in overtime during an Elite Eight game of the NCAA Tournament on March 26, 2005, at The Pit in Albuquerque. Credit: Getty Images/Elsa
The St. John’s basketball team may have had its ‘'Renaissance Moment'’ on Friday night.
Three nights earlier, the 12th-ranked Red Storm had beaten No. 11 Marquette at the Garden. They followed that by posting a 68-62 Big East triumph over two-time defending national champion and No. 19 Connecticut on Friday night to send a sellout crowd of 10,299 at Gampel Pavilion quietly into a chilly night.
Rick Pitino is an unmatched artist when it comes to sculpting the Renaissance Moment, when a once-dominant program that’s gone dormant again becomes great. Coming back to beat the Huskies sure looked like one, and I would know. I was there the last time Pitino created one.
One who does this as a profession for decades sees an incalculable number of games. This writer doesn’t have an encyclopedic memory for all of them like some do, but there are games that never leave you. Louisville’s 93-85 overtime victory over West Virginia in the 2005 NCAA Tournament West Regional title game in high altitude at The Pit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is one.
Louisville was the dominant force in college basketball during the 1980s under coach Denny Crum. The Cardinals reached a quartet of Final Fours and won national championships in 1980 and 1986. They slipped from the ranks of the elite toward the ranks of the irrelevant the next decade, making one Elite Eight and finishing under .500 twice. Then Crum retired and Pitino was brought in for the 2001-02 season to begin the restoration project.
That improbable win at The Pit sent Louisville back to the Final Four for the first time since 1986, and watching the way St. John’s rallied from 14 points down to beat UConn conjured something close to deja vu.
In 2005, West Virginia began the game with a three-point shooting blitz and opened the margin to 20 points before going into halftime up 40-27.
Louisville had used a full-court press sparingly that season because it had little depth (sound familiar, Red Storm fans?) and Pitino — for the first time he could remember — tossed the game plan to use a matchup zone in favor of a full-court press after halftime.
It was the catalyst for the comeback. The Mountaineers were 18-for-24 on three-pointers at the end of regulation and 0-for-3 on them in the overtime.
On Friday, UConn built its 14-point first-half lead while shooting 5-for-9 from three-point range before Pitino moved to a full-court press to wear out the Huskies' legs. They missed their last nine threes as St. John’s grabbed a 37-35 halftime lead and were 3-for-11 from outside the arc in the second half.
“Sometimes you go into a game with a mindset of how you're going to play defense and then it totally changes,” Pitino said Friday before telling the story of the 2005 Elite Eight game. “Sometimes your game plan just goes out the window because the other team tears it apart.”
After Louisville’s win, Taquan Dean was asked what Pitino was like in the huddle during timeouts in the second half and overtime and replied, “He just kept telling us stories about every great comeback his teams had made.”
There was a 23-point deficit that Pitino’s Celtics overcame against the Trail Blazers and the epic 31-point comeback Kentucky staged to beat LSU.
“LSU . . . that’s the one that really stuck in our heads,” Dean said. “He’s been down, but he knows you can’t quit.”
We know he invoked the Kentucky-LSU game as the Red Storm overcame a 16-point deficit on the road to beat Providence. He told them during one timeout, “This is nothing. I've been down 30 points with 15:30 to go on the road. It's nothing. You're going to come back and win this game.”
The confidence instilled in St. John’s clearly took root. As Kadary Richmond said Friday, “We’ve been down before — down big — and we always find a way to fight back.”
Want one more piece of symmetry? Louisville’s second-leading scorer in 2004-05 was Larry O’Bannon Jr. He hadn’t scored a point in the first half against the Mountaineers, but was a major factor after the break with 24 of the Cardinals' last 66 points.
Kadary Richmond, the Red Storm’s second-leading scorer, didn’t have a point in the first half against UConn but had 12 of their 31 after the break, including 10 in an 18-4 run in which St. John’s erased a six-point deficit and took the lead for good.
St. John’s is 21-3, is alone atop the Big East with a 12-1 mark and very likely will crack the AP Top 10 on Monday. It has the second-ranked defense in the country, according to kenpom.com, and ranks among the 10 best in the nation at offensive rebounding.
With tough home games against UConn and Creighton and rugged road games at Villanova and Marquette still ahead, maybe it’s too soon to say the Red Storm have arrived. But having seen Pitino do this before, it certainly felt that way in Storrs on Friday night.
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.
