For St. John's coach Rick Pitino, the best is yet to come for No. 6 Red Storm
St. John's guard RJ Luis Jr. celebrates with teammates after winning the Big East regular-season conference title against Seton Hall on Saturday at MSG. Credit: AP/Noah K. Murray
St. John’s enjoyed its biggest moment in years on Saturday when it defeated Seton Hall before a sellout crowd at the Garden to capture its first outright Big East regular-season title in 40 years. The building remained virtually full as a “One Shining Moment’’-type video of its season played on the scoreboard. Then the players hoisted the championship trophy as confetti washed over them.
Coach Rick Pitino addressed the crowd and finished by saying, “We’re just getting started.”
It sounded as if he were saying the Red Storm are ramping up for a deep March run. What he meant was that this is only a sampling of what St. John’s is going to become.
Neither how the words landed nor how they were intended matter. Both are happening at the same time.
St. John’s (26-4, 17-2) moved up a rung to No. 6 in the AP Top 25 poll released on Monday, so let’s first address the month ahead.
The Red Storm are formidable in so many ways: winning in hostile environments, coming back from big deficits and featuring a suffocating defense.
Pitino wanted to see if they could perform well enough to win when the stakes are highest, not on a final possession in a tie game or against another ranked opponent but when a season’s goal is on the line. Such as in an NCAA Tournament game, when everything is on the line.
The Red Storm had been striving to win the conference title all season, and last week, with it in sight, they realized they had something big to lose. And though they did not play their best basketball at Butler or against Seton Hall, they found a way to win.
The players have almost no NCAA experience, a total of 18 minutes in three games between Zuby Ejiofor at Kansas and Sadiku Ibine Ayo at Iona.
Pitino made winning the Big East title a team goal, but said to get there, they would have to compete in “every game as if it’s our last game of the season,” he explained Monday in an appearance on WFAN.
“But when it got to be two games left [to win it], at Butler and then the last game, I noticed something different in the team,” he said. “For the first time, I could see the pressure on them to win and I thought it was an awesome thing to witness, because we needed that test going into the Big East Tournament as well as the NCAA.
“Because these guys don’t have any experience at all with the NCAA and they’re going to have that pressure suddenly. There’s going to be tons of media. There’s going to be interviews and everything’s going to change for them and it’s a first-time experience. So I wanted that feeling of pressure on them so they could go through that.”
He also suggested we might see changes to address St. John’s frequent slow starts and expressed concern about the team’s 69% free-throw shooting.
“I don’t have a problem with the three-point shooting not being good. That’s who we are, what we are,” he said. “The free throws really bothers me because in the NCAA Tournament, you have to make free throws. It comes down quite often — 80 to 90% of the time — to how you shoot free throws.”
Pitino expected this team, his second at St. John’s, to contend for the conference title and make the NCAA Tournament. He admits some surprise at the Top 10 ranking, and he’s stunned by the fan base embrace that produced three straight Garden sellouts.
On Sunday’s CBS’ “Inside College Basketball,” when asked about the crowds, he replied, “We’re going to enhance it — probably go nine or 10 games at the Garden.” So one can see that when he said “we’re just getting started,” Pitino also was looking ahead.
“What I meant by ‘just getting started,’ I mean the program [and] that there’s a lot of joy and happiness that lies ahead,” Pitino told WNBC’s “Sports Final.”
“I didn’t mean with the NCAA Tournament, just getting started with building the program because it does take more than two years to build the program that’s been dormant for 20 years. It takes a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of things that take place outside the lines as well as between the lines.”
Pitino’s rebuilds at Providence, Kentucky and Louisville took quantum leaps in his second year. Kentucky needed four years to reach a Final Four and seven to win a national title. Louisville needed four to make a Final Four and 12 to win a national championship game. Now, with NIL money and the transfer portal, that timeline can be accelerated.
The importance of the backing of billionaire alumnus Mike Repole cannot be understated in speeding it up and helping Pitino make St. John’s a basketball destination for the nation’s top players. But there is more to what first-year athletic director Ed Kull calls “our goal of building sustained success” than just attracting already great players and developing more of them.
Playing games at the Garden and drawing great crowds is part of it. Kull’s plans for generating more streams of revenue and drawing in every generation of Red Storm fan is a part. The planned construction of a new basketball training facility is a part.
That’s what Pitino was eyeing. Saturday was a start to that, too.
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.
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