St. John's and preseason hype: It will take time to live up to it, but talent is there
St. John’s head coach Rick Pitino coaches against Michigan in the first half of an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 25. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
The hype around this St. John’s season arguably is unprecedented. The Red Storm are going into it ranked No. 5 in the nation. The people who know the program best — the other Big East coaches — anointed them the preseason favorite, a first since before the 1991-92 season. Those same coaches voted five St. John’s players on to the preseason All-Conference teams, including Player of the Year Zuby Ejiofor.
All of this buildup may very well be deserved. Certainly St. John’s fans think so, based on preseason sales of approximately 10,000 season tickets.
Asked about how it feels to have all this swirling around his team, third-year St. John’s coach Rick Pitino — who has been in coaching for five decades — was effusive.
“For me personally, I feel like I’m back at Louisville [or] Kentucky,” he said Friday as the team readied for Monday’s 6:30 p.m. season opener against MAAC preseason favorite Quinnipiac. “That’s the same feeling I had at Louisville, the same feeling I had at Kentucky. That was the norm. So this is the norm now for St. John’s.”
But there’s one thing to keep in mind about hype: Right now it is all just a forecast. What you see today in rankings and preseason awards may be based on past performance — OK, the forecast is informed — but now it has to unfold in regular-season games.
We will have a better idea about the Red Storm after the first week of regular-season play. It opens with the Quinnipiac game and ends with Saturday’s matchup against 15th-ranked Alabama at the Garden.
“I’m probably more excited than I’ve ever been, but I have some trepidation because of our schedule, playing Alabama in the second game,” Pitino said. “I have some trepidation — I’m not going to lie — but I am more excited than I’ve ever been about a season because of that competition. You don’t see it this early in the year for St John’s [typically] and we’ve got to be ready.”
It’s not as if we know nothing about the 2025-26 Red Storm. We have glimpsed some things — good and bad — because they played a pair of exhibition games. We’ve seen Dillon Mitchell’s underrated versatility shine, but we’ve also seen a defense that doesn’t nearly measure up to what Pitino expects.
Here’s another thing to keep in mind about the buildup: These things are really about what voters believe we will be seeing in February and March when the NCAA Tournament field is taking shape.
It’s been rare that teams come out of the gate as world-beaters, and it’s probably going to get even more rare with the presence of the NCAA transfer portal. St. John’s has 11 new players — though not all will be in the ultimate playing rotation — and it’s like that all over the country. Most elite programs are integrating several transfers every year now.
Here’s an extreme example of that: There was a moment in the last offseason when Baylor, which begins the year unranked but receiving votes in the AP poll, didn’t have a single player on the roster. Everyone on the Bears is new to the program this season.
But it’s a long season. Teams develop cohesion, and we have seen both of Pitino’s previous Red Storm teams do it. His first season at St. John’s included a stretch of eight losses in 10 conference games at one point. But it came on late, improved from 14-12 to 20-13, and was a tough match for eventual national champion UConn in the Big East Tournament.
Last season’s team dropped two of three early in the Bahamas but went on to become a defensive behemoth and overpowering rebounding squad that won 31 games and earned a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
There is no reason to believe this Red Storm team won’t follow a similar arc.
“I’m not focused on the future,” Pitino said. “I think I can tell you right now, we’re not going to have the record of last year just because of our schedule and just because the Big East is so much stronger this year than last year. But I think we can be a very good team. We were a very good team at the end of last year, we just ran into the wrong opponent, and that happens. This team is nowhere near last year’s team, but by the end of the year, they will be.”
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.
