IT'S THE EAST OF BURDEN
After 4th bust, seniors’ hollow legacy on line
LOOK, at some point, it simply isn’t enough to perform with class on the floor and to carry yourself with dignity off it if there’s no payoff on the scoreboard. At some point, it gets old hearing about overcoming obstacles and battling injuries and quieting doubters.
At some point, the basketball has to be the equal of the behavior.
And at this point — this critical tipping point in St. John’s basketball history — it simply is not. Not after Thursday, a second straight inexplicable, inexcusable firsthalf noshow in its Big East Tournament opener. Not after Providence, for a second straight year, chased the Johnnies off the Garden floor, this time by a 7457 score that felt worse, so much worse, than that.
“They established a tone early,” St. John’s coach Steve Lavin said. “And we couldn’t ever reverse that.”
“We were playing for some pride,” Providence coach Ed Cooley said, and it would have been nice if the team on the other side of the floor had done the same.
For a second straight year, St. John’s core — which we laud constantly for being unflappable, resilient, tough, all of that — was positively ransacked by a Friars team it’d already beaten twice, and unlike last year, there wasn’t even a token run to make it feel artificially close.
For a second straight year, Cooley so outcoached Steve Lavin that the mismatch wasn’t even worthy of the old checkersversuschess comparison, but more accurately backgammonversusCandy Land.
We keep wanting to praise this senior class, keep waiting for those players to seize a moment, any moment, and instead they are now 0fortheir careers in the Big East Tournament, four losses in four years in four openinground games by an average of 12 points a pop. All of them at the Garden, which is supposed to be their home office.
“We just couldn’t buy a shot,” said Jamal Branch, one of the seniors, “and they couldn’t miss.”
Now, those seniors get one last opportunity to salvage some kind of legacy for themselves. It is still OK to say they deserve that chance for all they have done in bringing pride back to Utopia Parkway, but it is equally fair to be brutally honest about it:
They’d better show up in the NCAA Tournament next week.
They’d better be better than they’ve been in every other highstakes game they have played these last four years, or else their legacy will be tarnished, and Lavin’s legacy will be defined by this: He’s been able to win one postseason game in five years — and even that was with Norm Roberts’ players. He may yearn for more than that. The players may well deserve better than that.
But at some point, you have to concede something:
The scoreboard doesn’t lie. And neither does the record book.
“I have to give them some perspective,” Lavin said. “I’ve had teams that lost their conference tournament game, and we were able to bounce back right away.”
He has no choice and neither do they: He has to get these players to buy into that. They didn’t exactly make their mission easy, either. A win against Providence and there is a good chance the Johnnies could have climbed as high as a seven seed. Now? The committee watches these games. Would it surprise you if they fell to a 10? Or even an 11?
And if that happens, how could you argue with it?
“We have to get ready for out next game,” Lavin said.
They have been good kids, quality players, excellent ambassadors. They have won a lot of basketball games. But they’ve lost a lot of them, too, including almost every single one that would have defined their time here as something other than gentlemanly competitors.
They have one more chance. No more mulligans. No more doovers. It’s in their hands, all of it, starting Sunday, when they find out where the journey starts. And, if they aren’t careful, where it’ll end.