Now, the rest of the Big East know St. John's is coming
St. John's Red Storm guard Kadary Richmond is swarmed by Xavier Musketeers defenders including guard Dailyn Swain in the first half of a Big East men’s basketball game at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The road ahead for St. John’s is only going to get tougher.
There’s four games against No. 10 Marquette and No. 19 Connecticut, and one against a Creighton team that already beat it by a point on New Year’s Eve. And, as Xavier showed on Wednesday night at the Garden, a bunch of teams that learned the hard way what it’s like to go against the 20th-ranked Red Storm.
But as St. John’s showed by rallying late for a 79-71 overtime win over the Musketeers without the services of injured point guard Deivon Smith, it may just have what it takes to persevere and prevail when that road gets roughest.
In ascending to sole possession of first place in the Big East and rising into the AP Top 25, St. John’s has lost the tiny edge it had in the element of surprise.
These teams that they’ve already played, and will be facing a second time, have seen the Storm’s best and defining qualities now. They know what it’s like trying to compete against their intensity, what it’s like trying to battle them on the backboards, and what it’s like to be defended to the teeth. And now that they’ve seen it, they think they have an idea of what it’s going to take to beat them.
St. John’s, though, appears to have some intangibles that only come from within.
“They have a fear of losing, which is a good thing . . . They just dig in and dig in and play magnificent when the game is on the line,” Storm coach Rick Pitino said. “Tonight we got outplayed. Tonight they were the better team for most of the game . . . [But] we just have a mindset that we’re going into the game and winning. We don’t think about anything except winning. We don’t get distracted by anything.
“It comes back to that fear of losing, because they want to win so badly.”
Getting an eyeful of St. John’s the first time had a profound impact on the Musketeers after St. John’s beat them by 10 points in Cincinnati on Jan. 7. Xavier coach Sean Miller isn’t prone to exaggeration and said afterward, “If you want to talk about a hard-playing, tough-minded group, I don’t know if there is a team in the country that embodies those qualities better than them.”
That loss made the Musketeers take a look in the mirror and call a players-only meeting where the leaders declared that they had to play harder. And Xavier has been better, winning three straight including an upset of Marquette in Milwaukee before arriving at the Garden.
As their Zach Freemantle said Saturday to FOX broadcaster John Fanta after the win over Marquette, “[St. John’s] bullied us. We’ve just got to show . . . you’re not going to come and punk us like that. We took it once. We’re not going to take it again.”
“They had 20 offensive rebounds [last game] and when a team can do that to you, you really have two choices: You can learn from it . . . or you can just kind of point fingers,” Miller said. “To our team’s credit, I thought that game was a great learning lesson.”
The challenge St. John’s faced with Xavier — defeating a team that’s already had the Red Storm experience and lost — is what it’s going to be like for the rest of the month and through much of the rest of the season.
Of facing teams the second time, Zuby Ejiofor said “Nobody wants to lose twice in this league, so we’re going to be taking their best shot.”
“Especially against this team because they felt we out-toughed them on the glass so they came in with the motive to play harder than us and be more aggressive,” Kadary Richmond said. “Then we responded in the second half to match the physicality.”
St. John plays Jan. 28 at Georgetown — two weeks after it beat the Hoyas by five at the Garden — and on Feb. 1 hosts Providence — who it beat by two points on the road in a wild game in late December.
Pitino is a Hall of Fame coach for a reason and knows that the Storm cannot play the exact same game it did against any opponent that has seen it before.
“Every single day, you have to add things because the people I coach against in every single game are just as good as us,” Pitino said earlier this month. “If it’s not broken and you’re winning, you must break it because they’re going to see what you’re doing well. And if you don’t break it and innovate and get creative and give them things that the opposition doesn’t know, the game will come down to a last-second shot.”
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.
