St. John's and Selection Sunday: How Red Storm turned their season around

St. John’s now finds itself in a situation that few could have imagined a month ago. The NCAA Tournament selection committee will unveil the 68-team bracket Sunday at 6 p.m., and there is a reasonable chance that the Red Storm will be in the field, even though a bunch of Saturday’s conference tournament results did them no favors.

For everyone on the team and its newly invigorated fan base, the selection show is something to look forward to, albeit with new anxiety after Saturday’s outcomes.

The Red Storm had to completely turn their season around to get here. They had to win all of their last five regular-season games — including a takedown of nationally ranked Creighton at the Garden and a tough road victory at Butler — and then post Thursday night’s 91-72 Big East Tournament semifinal win over a Seton Hall team that had beaten them twice. St. John’s (20-13) went almost a month without losing.

How did the Red Storm turn it around? There are a couple of competing theories. The one thing everyone can agree on is that Feb. 18 was rock bottom.

That day they hosted Seton Hall at UBS Arena is what had been pegged as an absolute must-win game. St. John’s built a 19-point lead in the first half, saw it cut to 12 at halftime and then scored only 21 points in the second half as the Pirates blew by for a 68-62 win.

At the postgame news conference, Rick Pitino appeared alone behind the microphone and delivered words that thrust the program into the national spotlight. He criticized his players, some by name, for their shortcomings.

Soon after, he apologized to them and explained himself to everyone else.

“What I said was all staged to try to get them to wake the hell up, and they woke up in a big way,” Pitino said after the Red Storm won at Butler. “I knew if we didn’t get better defensively, it was over. It was over . . . We weren’t stopping people, and I knew it was over.”

But while Pitino was delivering those words after the Feb. 18 loss, something else was beginning to happen in the Red Storm locker room: Desperation, long overdue, finally was setting in.

Every college basketball player wants to play in the NCAA Tournament. The Red Storm’s active roster includes only two players who had; Daniss Jenkins, who played in the 2023 Big Dance with Pitino’s Iona team, and Nahiem Alleyne, who played for defending national champion Connecticut before transferring to St. John’s. Four others — Joel Soriano, Chris Ledlum, Jordan Dingle and Sean Conway — were in their last season of eligibility and hadn’t tasted the tournament.

“We’d lost eight out of 10 games . . . It was desperation because we had no chance at anything,” Jenkins said Friday after the Red Storm’s 95-90 loss to UConn in the Big East Tournament semifinals. “The way we were playing, it was like we weren’t even going to talk after the season if we kept going that way. So it was the point where we said, ‘We can’t go out like this.’

“Our backs were against the wall and we had to show what we were truly made of. We had to come together because that was the only way to get out of it. You can’t do that as [individuals].”

At points along the way, several Red Storm players have described the improved cohesiveness. Dingle said they are “having more fun.” Ledlum said they “have learned to play together.” Alleyne used the word “connected” to describe them.

The way Jenkins describes it, the Red Storm went from playing together to relying on one another. Everything they did was no longer about executing the play correctly, it was about doing it with conviction.

“We came together as a team, started opening up to each other more,” Jenkins said. “We started pulling things together more and trusting each other more.”

Did Pitino’s challenge to the team that day spark something? “We heard the words, all right,” Jenkins said.

But that alone wasn’t going to get the Red Storm right. It also had to come from inside. They had to believe in each other for this to happen. Now they do, and it has.

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.