Coach Mullin’s old team his model
NEW YORK — To rebuild the St. John’s basketball program, Chris Mullin has needed patience, loaded recruiting classes and plenty of video of the team that hangs his No. 17 jersey from Oracle Arena’s rafters.
Mullin, in his third season as the Red Storm’s head coach, cues up Warriors highlights whenever he wants to show his players how to space the floor, work off screens, cut toward the rim, make the extra pass or help off their man on defense. More than any specific action, Mullins wants his team to emulate Golden State’s egalitarian ethos.
“I always try to steal some stuff,” Mullin said Sunday night after watching the Warriors’ 118-111 win over the Nets at Barclays Center. “It’s about being unselfish defensively and offensively.”
Mullin spent much of his NBA career trying to make Golden State a championship contender, both as a player and general manager. Now, as the Warriors chase their third NBA title in four years, he hopes to bring his alma mater back to the heights to which he led them as a player in the 1980s.
St. John’s has made steady progress since Mullin took the job 31 months ago, spiking from eight wins in 2015-16 to 14 last season. A Red Storm team picked by conference coaches to finish sixth in the 10-school Big East appears poised for a breakthrough in Mullin’s third year.
The program added two
prized transfers — Justin Simon (Arizona) and Marvin Clark II (Michigan State) — to its backcourt tandem of sophomores Shamorie Ponds (18.3 points per game) and Marcus LoVett (17.3). After a 71-43 romp over Division II Molloy on Monday night, St. John’s has won its first four games by a combined 92 points, including Thursday’s 79-56 rout of Nebraska.
“Last season, we made kind of a nice step,” Mullin said. “This is going to be a tougher step. I think we have the guys to do it. I feel good about it.”
Mullin is accustomed to reclamation projects. Drafted seventh overall from St. John’s in 1985, he was a rookie on a Warriors team that won 30 games. The team reached the playoffs five of the next eight seasons. Mullin, a five-time All-Star nagged by injuries, was traded to the Pacers in 1997. Three years later, Mullin — then 37 — played 20 games for a Golden State team that finished 17-65.
In 2004, with the franchise a decade into a 12-year playoff drought, he became the Warriors’ top basketball executive. Mullin assembled the 2006-07 “We Believe” team that was the first No. 8 seed in NBA history to beat a No. 1 seed in a sevengame series. By the time his contract wasn’t renewed in 2009, he was Golden State’s most successful executive of the previous 15 years — admittedly not a high bar to clear in Oakland at the time.
All those experiences instilled in him the patience necessary to shepherd St. John’s back to national relevance.
In 2015, when he was hired as the Red Storm’s head coach 30 years after leading the school to the Final Four, Mullin inherited a team losing four of its top six scorers to graduation. Top returning scorer Rysheed Jordan left the program after he was ruled academically ineligible. Chris Obekpa, who had led the nation in blocks as a freshman two years earlier, transferred to UNLV.
St. John’s lost a preseason exhibition to Division II St. Thomas Aquinas by 32 points, an inauspicious start for its first-time coach. Mullin lost all but one game in the Big East that season. In addition to finishing at the bottom of the conference standings, the Red Storm were last in the league in scoring average, field-goal percentage, rebounding margin and turnovers. That first season was so ugly that a blogger for a local CBS affiliate argued in a story that Mullin deserved to be fired.
“You’ve just got to understand the situation you’re in so you can get the right plan together,” Mullin said. “The biggest thing is just staying positive through what you know is going to be a pretty tough time.”
The Warriors’ rapid rise to prominence provided a bit of a blueprint. While his jersey was being retired during a halftime ceremony in March 2012, Mullin watched as the Oracle Arena crowd — upset about the recent trade of Monta Ellis — booed team majority owner Joe Lacob. Three years later, Golden State won its first NBA title since 1975.
To speed up St. John’s rebuild, Mullin sold some of the nation’s top prospects on restoring the luster to the once-revered program in Queens. Discussing Golden State in team meetings has helped him meld heralded individuals into a unit.
Sometimes, while studying video of another Warriors win, Mullin still struggles to reconcile the dominant team on screen with the organization he long tried to make elite.
“They’re great ambassadors for the game,” Mullin said before pointing toward a youth basketball clinic on the Barclays Center court, where more than two dozen of the 100-plus kids were wearing Golden State gear. “Look, we’re in Brooklyn. There’s a Nets clinic with all those Warriors jerseys. It’s pretty amazing.”