THE MUSIC’S NOT OVER
Odds against them, but Johnnies still have chance to dance
Dreams of a long-awaited return to the NCAA Tournament aren’t dead for St. John’s just yet.
Sunday’s statement victory over No. 15 Creighton gave new life to a Red Storm team that appeared poised to miss March Madness following a five-week freefall in the middle of Big East play.
But even after Sunday’s 80-66 victory at the Garden – the Johnnies’ first ranked win under Rick Pitino – St. John’s faces an uphill climb with no room for setbacks.
Despite a strong start to the season, St. John’s sits at 16-12 overall and 8-9 against the Big East, good for seventh in the conference. ESPN, CBS Sports and Fox Sports bracketologists still projected St. John’s to miss the tournament despite Sunday’s win.
The Red Storm’s remaining regular-season opponents are Butler, DePaul and Georgetown, which occupy the bottom three spots in the Big East. Winning those three games won’t dramatically transform the Johnnies’ résumé, but a loss in any would certainly destroy it.
Following those games, St. John’s likely needs to make a run in next month’s Big East Tournament to land one of the 68 spots in the tournament. Winning the conference tournament at the Garden would be the most straightforward path, albeit a difficult one, but doing so would automatically clinch a March Madness berth.
“I think our guys have always believed it could be done,” Pitino said Sunday of winning games in the Big East Tournament. “Sometimes, because they are new, they don’t know how to get it done. They get frustrated sometimes and they try to play so hard. They try to get it back in the next 10 seconds. We told them every four minutes that we want to make sure we are moving the basketball. They did a fabulous job with it (on Sunday).”
St. John’s put itself in a solid position midway through the season, boasting a 12-4 record that included a 4-1 start to conference play. It then lost eight of 10 games, sometimes in excruciating fashion.
The bleeding included a loss last week to Seton Hall in which St. John’s blew a 19-point lead. Afterward, Pitino candidly criticized his team’s athleticism and toughness while mentioning multiple players by name – controversial comments he later apologized for.
The Johnnies have mostly beaten up on bad-to-average teams but struggled against tougher opponents. That disparity is highlighted by the NCAA’s NET Rankings, which value every win and loss using a four-quadrant system based on factors including an opponent’s winning percentage and where the game took place.
The Johnnies’ upset victory over Creighton marked only their second Quadrant 1 win, compared to nine losses. Those losses include two against UConn, two against Marquette and one against Creighton in Omaha, Neb., in the teams’ first meeting last month. Before Sunday, the Red Storm’s only Quad 1 win came at Villanova in early January.
What keeps St. John’s alive are six Quad 2 wins in eight games. The Johnnies’ Quad 3 record is 3-1, with a home loss to a miserable Michigan team in the second game of the season looking worse and worse. St. John’s avoided catastrophe with a 5-0 Quad 4 record.
The Red Storm’s last chance to pick up another regular-season Quad 1 win comes Wednesday on the road against reeling Butler, which has lost four games in a row and is 7-10 in Big East play. Subsequent games against DePaul on the road and Georgetown at home will only affect the Johnnies’ Quad 4 record.
The NCAA Tournament grants automatic bids to 32 conference winners, leaving 36 at-large bids up for grabs. The Big East seems set to send at least four teams to this year’s tournament, with UConn, Marquette and Creighton considered locks.
St. John’s hired Pitino before the season in hopes of turning around a program that hasn’t made an NCAA Tournament appearance since 2019 and last won a tournament game in 2000.
Pitino overhauled the roster, bringing back only two players from last year’s team, including center Joel Soriano, who averages 14.7 points and 9.4 rebounds per game. Point guard Daniss Jenkins, who followed Pitino from Iona last spring, leads St. John’s with 14.8 points per game and scored a season-high 27 in Sunday’s win.
Pitino touted his team’s performance Sunday as its best of the season, while Creighton coach Greg McDermott said he thought St. John’s looked like a tournament team during its commanding victory.
“I did today,” McDermott said. “I think anyone that watched did today. Coach Pitino had to bring in a whole team, and when you do that, you’re not going to be at your best in November and December. The Big East is an unforgiving league, especially this year. … They can beat anybody on any given night and I hope they get the opportunity to do so.”
Whether St. John’s gets that opportunity will come down to how much damage it does against Big East opponents the rest of the way.