St. John’s coach Rick Pitino didn’t like the shots UConn was getting early on, didn’t like the shots his usually incredible defense was allowing early on, didn’t like his team eventually falling behind by as many as 14 points in Friday night’s first half.
So he started pressing.
And then UConn started turning the ball over and never really stopped. By the time the final buzzer had sounded, UConn had given the ball away 15 more times than the Red Storm, which limited the Huskies to 14 fewer field goal attempts. And, as UConn coach Dan Hurley more or less acknowledged afterward, if you take 14 fewer shots than a team as good defensively as St. John’s has been this season, and then lose the points-off-turnovers battle by 18, you’re not winning that game.
Final score: St. John’s 68, UConn 62.
After falling behind 24-10, the Red Storm outscored UConn 58-38 the rest of the way to extend their winning streak to 10 games while improving to 21-3 overall, 12-1 in the Big East.
“What the press has done for me, for 40 years, has worn people out, legs-wise, where they don’t shoot the ball as well,” Pitino explained afterward. “It’s always been the gift that my teams have had. If we can wear out their legs, they won’t shoot as well. But they were coming at us, and they were getting too many easy shots. So I felt the full-court press would take a little starch out of their shots, take a little time in the backcourt [and] make us ultra-aggressive.
“We pressed more tonight than we normally have,” Pitino added. “But that’s because of what they were doing to us offensively early on.”
That decision flipped the game.
UConn scored 26 points in the first 7:22 and just 36 points in the final 32:38. As a result, St. John’s now has the second-best defense in the nation, according to BartTorvik.com. And that defense actually ranks No. 1, by a significant margin, during the Red Storm’s current 10-game winning streak.
What. A. Story.
As I said on Wednesday’s episode of the Eye On College Basketball Podcast, what’s happening at St. John’s right now, in Year 2 under Pitino, has turned into my favorite story of this season. The 72-year-old Naismith Memorial Hall of Famer — and two-time national champion who was nonsensically exiled from power-conference basketball for six years — has taken over a historically big brand that’s been mostly bad for much of the past three decades and turned it into a Final Four contender less than two years after accepting the job, which means Pitino becoming the first person to ever lead four different schools to the Final Four is very much in play. Put another way, this man who was fired at Louisville and reduced to coaching mid-major basketball has built a team in his second year at St. John’s better than the teams currently at Kentucky and Louisville, two places where he previously built national championship teams.
It really is incredible.
St. John’s is up to No. 8 in Saturday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings, which caused Marquette, Iowa State, Texas A&M, Memphis, Michigan State, Ole Miss, Missouri and Kansas to all be pushed down one spot each, no fault of their own. The Red Storm are now projected to win the Big East by two games, according to KenPom.com. That’s another testament to Pitino’s brilliance given that the program hasn’t even won a share of a Big East title since 1992.
Top 25 And 1 rankings
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