IT'S A STORM SURGE
Days of grading on a curve over
THE feel-good portion of the Chris Mullin Welcome Home Program ended a long time ago. The benefits of the doubt have all been exhausted. For the first time in years, the St. John’s basketball team will not be graded on a curve, or viewed exclusively through a fuzzy, hazy prism. It will be judged, exclusively, on victories. Imagine that. Which is as it should be, of course. Which is why it was good to see the Red Storm look so aggressive, so loose, so free as they ran roughshod over Loyola-Maryland at Carnesecca Arena Wednesday night, 76-55. Yes, the opponent was a lower-end Patriot League team. Yes, we will only really start to understand who these Johnnies are once league play starts. Still …
“I’ll be honest,” Mullin said. “I really wanted to see what these guys would look like playing together.”
So did the legion of New York college basketball fans who have stood patiently by and waited for this program to regenerate. St. John’s has been too big a part of New York’s basketball fabric for too long to have lain in state this long. As awful as it is to see the Knicks grind their part of the city’s basketball legacy to dust across the last two decades, it’s been just as depressing seeing what the Johnnies have done to their own lofty perch. Think about this: As recently as 2002, St. John’s was selected for the NCAA Tournament for the 24th time in the previous 35 years — and in most of those years, the NCAA was a 24-, 32-, 40- or 48-game invitational that was a lot harder to qualify for than it is now. And in some of those years, the NIT was still considered an ample March option, especially for the de facto home college team in New York.
We tend to think about the Johnnies in soft, nostalgic, little-engine-that-could terms and forget this was every bit the national program only 16 years ago, fueled by high expectations and nourished by reaching them year after year.
Since 2002, there have been two NCAA Tournament appearances. Count them: two. There are any number of people to blame for this, though we have officially put enough time between now and the seminal Mike Jarvis Era to lay all of the blame anymore on Jarvis’ shoulders (though he did nudge the boulder downhill). Norm Roberts could never quite get it all turned around. Neither could Steve Lavin, despite rabid fanfare about his recruiting victories. Lavin made one NCAA Tournament with Roberts’ players and one with his own. And that’s been that.
It has been a dizzying descent.
“We have high expectations,” said Shamorie Ponds, the Big East’s preseason player of the year. “We know what we can do this year.”
Which is why this year dawns so differently. Which is why there was a different buzz that attended this game with 4,863 in the house and the studentsnts loud and bboisterous, old Alumni Hall feeling a little bit like it used to feel back in the day, when Opening Night was simply the inevitable first act of a wonderful four-month adventure along Utopia Parkway.
Elsewhere in college basketball’s upper firmament Tuesday night, Duke played Kentucky and Michigan State played Kansas, and those are the games that got the most attention, as they should.
But for St. John’s fans that have waited a long time for this kind of season and this kind of roster, waded too long through basketball purgatory, Johnnies-Greyhounds was just fine.
“We’ll get better,” Mullin said. “My college coach always told me: ‘Your job is to get good players.’ We have good players on this team. It’s exciting to watch them.”
Ponds and Auburn transfer Mustapha Heron combined for 35 points and already look like they have a nice bit of chemistry together, and there is so much depth now Mullin can keep throwing wave after wave of players into the game all year. It was a nice way to start.
At last, a season begins with genuine hope and genuine hopefulness. No grading on a curve. St. John’s ought to carry us through another long New York winter. This is their time. It’s been a long time.