St. John's coach Rick Pitino wants exactly this kind of test
St. John’s head coach Rick Pitino during the Alabama game at Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
Not long after Rick Pitino took the job as St. John’s coach in March 2023, the phone calls started coming. One after another, head coaches from many of the nation’s top programs reached out to the Hall of Famer looking to start a series against his Red Storm.
That should come as no surprise: Everyone wants a home-and-home that includes a date at the Garden.
It took the events of the final days of St. John’s 2024-25 season that got Pitino to seriously engage them in dialogue, the start of a conversation that brought about Saturday’s meeting between the fifth-ranked Red Storm and 15th-ranked Alabama.
Last March, the Red Storm were seeded No. 2 in the NCAA Tournament West Regional and facing No. 10 Arkansas of the SEC, and Pitino knew his team hadn’t encountered an opponent with the kind of length and athleticism the Razorbacks and so many of their SEC brethren have.
Thanks to Vice TV’s docuseries about last season, we even got to see Pitino tell his team in a conference room at the Graduate Biltmore Hotel in Providence, “If we beat them, we will win the national championship. This is the most athletic team we will face. There’s other great teams, but if we beat them, we will win it all.”
Arkansas bounced St. John’s, 75-66, and that began to inform Pitino’s thinking about this season’s schedule. And now we see the Red Storm facing three SEC foes: the Crimson Tide — which prevailed, 103-96, before 17,319 at the Garden on Saturday afternoon — plus Ole Miss and No. 9 Kentucky. There also are games with No. 16 Iowa State and Baylor and another high-major matchup to be determined.
Asked Friday if building this rigorous schedule that leads into Big East play was a direct result of the loss to Arkansas, Pitino replied, “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a factor — it was certainly a factor.”
The goal is twofold: St. John’s needs to know where it needs to improve its game to beat such opponents and needs the experience of having faced that type of team. Those are things that serve programs with Final Four aspirations.
Now they’ve had an experience, and there clearly are areas in which the Red Storm need to improve to become the team Pitino envisions.
Nothing stuck out more than St. John’s shortcomings on defense, particularly the inability of its three backcourt mainstays — Oziyah Sellers, Ian Jackson and Joson Sanon — to offer any resistance against Alabama’s first-rate trio of guards.
Labaron Philon Jr., Aden Holloway and Latrell Wrightsell Jr. scored a combined 63 points, shot 52% from the floor, made eight three-pointers and had 10 assists against one turnover.
“We played these early games so we can find out where we need to get better, and obviously we know we need to get better at one-on-one defense,” Pitino said. “We learned a lot tonight. [I’m] disappointed we lost, but we certainly learned a lot and we'll get better from it.
“It's great for Ian and Joson and even Oziyah to understand that they've got to become great defensive players for us to beat great teams and they're not right now.”
Zuby Ejiofor, who was far and away St. John’s best player with 27 points and 10 rebounds, concluded that this was about much more than guard play when he said, “The defense wasn’t there all day.”
St. John’s might not face another backcourt with the Crimson Tide's speed and shooting ability for the rest of the regular season. But this was always going to be about more than just the regular season. The entire blueprint of the non-conference schedule is a design for success in March, when Pitino-coached teams have always been at their best.
“[Pitino] doesn’t have to play a tough schedule, and obviously we’ve been pretty good the past five years or so,” Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats said. “He’s got one of the best teams in the country [and] they'll be one of the best teams when it comes down to it.”
St. John’s may have failed this first big test, but other biggies lie ahead. Two weeks from Monday, they will begin a stretch of three games in three days at the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas with contests against Iowa State and Baylor. Next month brings games with Ole Miss and Kentucky.
“You could go play somebody and win by 30 points — you see some of the scores last night — and you get nothing out of that,” Pitino said. “I think we have the potential to be an outstanding basketball team, but as a head coach, I need to find out where our deficiencies lie, and I found out tonight . . . we lost this game at the defensive end.
“I also found out that they're a group of guys that want to win badly,” he added. “They just didn't know how to do it.”
The first part of that lesson is going to be defense.
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.
