St. John's picked to win the Big East, but faces a stiff test from UConn

If St. John’s and Connecticut didn’t look like a pair of heavyweight combatants sizing each other up before, they certainly have to be after the developments of the past two weeks.

The AP preseason Top 25 was announced last week with UConn at No. 4 and the Red Storm at No. 5. And Tuesday at the Garden when the Big East held its media day, St. John’s was narrowly picked to win in a poll of the people who know both teams best, the conference’s coaches.

Defending Big East champion St. John’s got seven of 11 first-place votes for 97 points and the Huskies got the other four for 94 points. It’s the first time since 1991-92 that the Storm go into a season as the Big East favorites.

The juxtaposition of national and conference polls made the prospect of their coming battle for the Big East title — including their two head-to-head contests — by far the biggest story line and most of the buzz Tuesday at MSG.

In discussing the blossoming rivalry and the way Storm coach Rick Pitino and he get under each other’s skin, Huskies coach Dan Hurley said: “I do think there’s certainly a nastiness to when we’re going to play St John’s. But I don’t think it’s disrespectful. I’m not disrespectful of coach Pitino and who he is and what he’s accomplished. [Still] there’s definitely an intensity and a tension between the programs.”

Pitino took a more understated stance Tuesday, saying: “I don’t consider Connecticut any more of a rival than Villanova or Providence or Marquette or Creighton or any of them. I think their fan base makes them very special because they travel bigger than anybody else . . . We’ve got great respect for them. We’ve had some great games, even in the Garden [when] we lost, 95-90 [in a 2024 Big East quarterfinal] and they won the national championship.”

“I don’t have any rivalry with Dan Hurley,” he added. “They said the same [stuff] about John Calipari and me . . . Coaches don’t have rivalries.”

But there certainly is something there, from Pitino threatening to take a home game with UConn from the Garden to Carnesecca Arena to the incident in that 2024 quarterfinal when Hurley tried to have one of Pitino’s friends sitting courtside ejected because “he was behaving worse than coach Pitino.”

The eagerness for the coming battle was only fueled further with the announcement of the preseason all-conference teams voted by coaches. Five players on each team earned distinctions, most significantly St. John’s Zuby Ejiofor as Player of the Year.

For the Storm, Bryce Hopkins was a first-teamer, Ian Jackson a second-teamer and Joson Sanon and Dillon Mitchell third-teamers. UConn’s Solo Ball, Alex Karaban and Tarris Reed Jr. were all first-teamers, Silas Demary Jr. a second-teamer and Braylon Mullins Freshman of the Year.

When Pitino was asked if a day with all these accolades merited reminding his players that they’d yet to play a game, he replied, “The one thing they can attest to: When practice ends, none of them think they’re No. 1.”

These projections are just the latest developments in what’s become the most anticipated college basketball season in New York in a long time. It actually started last season with St. John’s winning a school record-tying 31 games and capturing the Big East Tournament title and its first NCAA Tournament victory in 25 years. Then Pitino brought in what 247sports.com ranked as the nation’s top class of transfers. Then they scheduled 13 Garden dates, beginning with Saturday night’s final exhibition against No. 7 Michigan.

It’s nothing short of amazing how far St. John’s has come since hiring Pitino in March 2023. Before the move, the Red Storm were nowhere and growing more and more irrelevant every year while Connecticut was winning its fifth national championship since 1999. Today the programs are seen as an even match and their scheduled games among the most awaited of the season. Their Feb. 6 meeting was placed in the high-profile slot of a Friday night at the Garden.

And even Hurley thinks the idea of his Huskies and Pitino’s Storm being seen as equals as a positive.

“It’s great for college basketball to have rivalries, to have programs that are both legitimately top five or top 10-caliber,” he said. “You can’t do a rivalry if one team . . . has won six national championships since 1999 and the other hasn’t had any level of success.

“The fact that [Pitino] has their program — the way they played last year and what they look like in the preseason — makes it exciting.”

It’s exciting, all right. Everyone can’t wait to see St. John’s and UConn vying for the Big East title and probably even more.

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.