Roger Rubin: St. John's has big week ahead, highlighted by game against UConn
St. John's Zuby Ejiofor dunks over Butler's Michael Ajayi in the second half of a Big East men’s basketball game at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
St. John’s is getting a breather this weekend and has reached February and the second half of the Big East schedule as a team on the rise.
The Red Storm have won seven straight games, including four on the road. The squad that less than a month ago was considered by many to be one of college basketball’s biggest disappointments — a team that fell from No. 5 in the nation to getting zero AP poll votes — is back in the national rankings at No. 25 and alone in second place in the conference, just behind No. 2-ranked Connecticut.
“Obviously, we got off to a rocky start,” Zuby Ejiofor said. “We stayed level-headed and attacked every day like we’re supposed to and we’re finally starting to reap the rewards . . . and turn our season around just a little bit.
“It’s every guy on the team being committed to our team goals. We got back in the rankings, but I don’t think that’s [the goals] we’re talking about.”
Just ahead is a very interesting and significant stretch. St. John’s (16-5, 9-1) has three games in seven days, each with its own intrigue.
It starts Tuesday when the Red Storm play at DePaul (12-10, 4-7), which is 4-1 against conference foes at Wintrust Arena.
The most anticipated game of the Red Storm's season comes on Friday when St. John's takes on UConn (20-1, 10-0 entering Saturday night's game against Creighton) before a sellout crowd at the Garden and a national prime-time television audience.
No Big East game held more gravitas after both opened the season in the Top 10, but some of that faded as the Red Storm lost to every ranked team it met while the Huskies rolled up wins over No. 13 BYU, No. 9 Illinois, No. 14 Kansas and No. 19 Florida. Now Rick Pitino’s Red Storm have been rolling and UConn prevailed in some unexpected nail-biters.
The stretch wraps with a Garden game against Richard Pitino-coached Xavier on Feb. 9. The Red Storm just beat the Musketeers by five in Cincinnati for Rick Pitino’s 900th win. And if St. John’s arrives on a nine-game winning streak, he could get No. 903 to tie Roy Williams for third place on the all-time list.
This weekend pause is a good moment to survey how the Red Storm turned a corner. Certain issues kept surfacing during their slide — defensive rebounding, turnovers, playmaking and toughness — and all are beginning to fade in the rearview mirror.
Defensive rebounding: St. John’s gave up too many offensive rebounds and second-chance points when it struggled. Not anymore. In the first 14 games, the Red Storm allowed opponents an average of 13.5 offensive rebounds for 12.4 second-chance points; in the past seven, it’s 8.3 for 6.6 second-chance points.
Turnovers: Since Pitino moved forward Dillon Mitchell into the starting lineup and asked him to take on more ballhandling duties, turnovers are down and the team is 7-0. Before the change, St. John’s committed 12.7 giveaways per game; it’s fallen to 8.4 since.
Playmaking: The Red Storm surge has coincided with greater reliance on the frontcourt to set up scoring. The three bigs in the new starting lineup — Ejiofor, Mitchell and Bryce Hopkins — are the three team leaders in assists (3.3, 2.6 and 2.3, respectively).
Pitino said after Tuesday's win over Butler, “Zuby is really adding to his game, becoming a great passer.”
And Butler coach Thad Matta said, “Those three guys' interior passing [is] incredible.”
Toughness: It’s a quality that’s less quantifiable, but you see it in the way St. John’s competes, whether it’s Ruben Prey diving on the floor for loose balls, attacking the basket to get more free throws than the other team or staging second-half comebacks to beat Seton Hall and Xavier.
“[Pitino] can't go on the court and produce, but [he] shows us and tells us exactly what we need to work on and it's our jobs to go out there and execute,” Ejiofor said. “It takes a full team commitment to be able to look yourselves in the eye and . . . realizing what our weaknesses are and trying to [address] them.”
Storm won't be in next season's CBS Sports Classic
It was kind of a big deal that St. John’s was selected to play in this season’s CBS Sports Classic in Atlanta, the game it ultimately lost to Kentucky in December. Organizers needed a team to replace UCLA, and the Red Storm had become the kind of high-profile program they wanted to join regulars Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio State.
But St. John's is being replaced by Kansas in next season’s event, which is being played at the Garden.
It’s not that St. John’s didn’t want to play in it again — it did — but its television obligations to Fox prevented it. The network owns the television rights to games played in Big East cities, and school officials didn’t have a work-around. As Pitino put it, “Can’t fight City Hall.”
It was a little complicated for St. John’s to even accept the invitation this season, as it needed to clear the day of a potential Big East matchup.
At this point, the Red Storm are playing at least three non-conference games in next season’s Players Era Festival in Las Vegas and a return date against Alabama in Birmingham.
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.
