St. John’s loses heartbreaker to Butler, but shows improvement in process

Mike Anderson still has many positives to take away from St. John’s even after Red Storm lost rollercoaster Big East opener against butler Tuesday. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

NEW YORK — It’s been a long December, and there’s reason to believe

Maybe this year will be better than the last

I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself to hold on

To these moments as they pass

— Counting Crows, “A Long December”

Habitually, I play that song in the last hour of the night every December 31. For St. John’s fans, the amount of long Decembers on the corner of Union and Utopia has approached the legal drinking age since there was any kind of sustained upward mobility around the program that markets itself as New York’s team.

But as Don Henley famously opined, in a New York minute, everything can change. Mike Anderson’s first months on the job since replacing Chris Mullin were living proof. From the active offseason to the non-conference victories over West Virginia and Arizona, a pair of programs firmly entrenched within the Top 25, the Red Storm had undergone a 180-degree rotation and was playing with a purpose entering Tuesday’s Big East Conference opener against Butler, a program ranked tenth in the nation coming into the literal final game of the decade, and one from whom St. John’s had taken each of the previous three encounters at Carnesecca Arena, both of the last two requiring overtime to do so.

For the first 22 minutes Tuesday, free basketball was nowhere near the realm of possibility, not with the visiting Bulldogs opening up a 42-19 lead against a Red Storm offense rendered anemic by a 7-for-31 start from the floor and misses on each of the eleven shots it dared to attempt from distance. Then, Nick Rutherford showed up.

The graduate transfer — ironically a native of Butler’s Indianapolis locale — by way of Florida Atlantic and Monmouth, was the catalyst for St. John’s with Mustapha Heron unavailable and LJ Figueroa hampered by foul trouble. Rutherford made offense happen through defense, stopping a 25-2 run by recording four of his six steals during an improbable comeback for the hosts, who erased any lingering flashbacks to Marquette in 2009 or Penn State in 2016 by spearheading a 29-4 spurt that he capped with 6:49 remaining in regulation by feeding Marcellus Earlington to give the Johnnies a 48-46 lead with the last of 19 unanswered markers.

“When your back is against the wall, you can either sink or swim,” said Rutherford, whose 15 points led St. John’s and served as one of four double-digit scoring efforts on the whole. “We have a team full of fighters. Our coach is a fighter, the whole staff are fighters. We never thought we were going to lose this game, to be honest with you.”

“The other guys kind of followed his lead,” Anderson echoed. “We’re playing without our second-leading scorer, and not only that, our other leading scorer doesn’t score in the game. I thought our guys just dug in the trenches and said, ‘let’s ramp it up.’”

Even after Kamar Baldwin — the all-Big East senior still searching for his first Carnesecca victory — ended the miraculous stretch with a go-ahead three, back came St. John’s, opening up a 58-53 lead with three minutes to play after a Rasheem Dunn layup. It would be the last field goal the Red Storm would convert, however.

Free throws from Duke expatriate and one-time Stepinac wunderkind Jordan Tucker, followed by a gutsy Baldwin runner, brought Butler within one point inside the final minute, then Aaron Thompson’s offensive rebound set up an open triple from Christian David — who entered Tuesday’s action averaging just 3.4 points per game and had not scored prior to finding the net with 43 seconds left, vaulting the Bulldogs back into the lead, by a 60-58 margin. St. John’s had one last chance following a tie-up with the possession arrow in its favor, but Dunn’s inability to drive the lane and control the ball resulted in a late breakdown, and by the time it reached Figueroa, all he could do was launch a prayer that knifed through the air, deflating the comeback and handing Butler a road victory in its league opener.

“All we could do was just come back swinging,” Greg Williams surmised as St. John’s (11-3, 0-1 Big East) learned a valuable lesson that will certainly pay off handsomely down the road. “I feel like we did that. We were playing our brand of basketball. We just happened to come up short, but we’re going to bounce back and get ready for the next game (Sunday at Xavier, a stern road test that preceded another tall order away from home against Georgetown three days later).”

But gut punch aside, there were mounds of positives from the Red Storm. How many times was the Mullin regime caught with its collective pants down when facing a 23-point deficit? How many times did the likes of Williams, Earlington and Josh Roberts get the opportunity to play through inconsistency to show the potential that was always there, just masked behind inefficiency on the coaching staff’s behalf? This is indeed a new day, and the aggressive mantra of the new sheriff in town has made its way into the hearts of his platoon.

“We dug a hole, but we got back in it,” Anderson proudly reiterated. “I think that’s the most important thing. We have to learn how to finish, but we were right there. In the Big East, when you have these kinds of games, experience is going to be a factor, but I think our guys will learn.”

“I’ve never been more proud of this team. My guys left it on the floor. They fought, and they never gave in.”

Maybe, just maybe, as Adam Duritz proposed almost a quarter-century ago, this year WILL be better than the last.