Pitino leaves Iona, replaces Mike Anderson at St. John’s

Rick Pitino has agreed to leave Iona and take over at St. John’s, where he replaces Mike Anderson as Red Storm head coach. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

Rick Pitino is getting one more shot at the high-major level.

The Iona coach, who won a pair of Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championships during his three years with the Gaels, has agreed to become the next head coach at St. John’s. A formal introduction will take place Tuesday at Madison Square Garden. Stadium college basketball insider Jeff Goodman has reported that Pitino agreed to a six-year contract to coach the Red Storm.

Pitino, 70, replaces Mike Anderson, who was fired after four seasons in which he led the Red Storm to a winning record in each, but did not compete in postseason play. The program has not been to the NCAA Tournament since 2019, the last of Chris Mullin's four years at the helm of his alma mater.

Pitino comes to Queens on the heels of a 27-8 campaign in which Iona won the MAAC regular season championship by four games over Rider, and each of its three conference tournament games by double-digit margins. The Gaels lost to UConn in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The Hall of Famer also guided Iona into the field of 68 in 2021, when he and his team navigated through four pauses due to COVID-19 during the season before winning four games in five days to earn the MAAC’s automatic NCAA Tournament bid.

After he was exonerated by the Independent Accountability Resolution Process for any alleged involvement in the scandal at Louisville that cost him his job in 2017, Pitino immediately became linked to a bevy of high-major coaching vacancies. Amid the rumors, he stated it would “take a special place” for him to consider leaving Iona, the university that brought him back to the college ranks in 2020 after Tim Cluess was forced to retire due to health issues. Following the decision to part ways with Anderson, St. John’s president Rev. Brian Shanley made Pitino his sole target in the search process, with the coach calling Shanley a “superstar” after meeting him last year at a reunion honoring Providence’s 1987 team, which Pitino led to a Final Four. Shanley, the former Providence president, also attempted to woo Pitino away from Louisville to coach the Friars in 2011 before hiring Ed Cooley.

Through more than four decades at Boston University, Providence, Kentucky, Louisville and Iona, Pitino brings a career record of 834-293 to St. John’s, and remains the only coach in NCAA history to direct two schools to national championships, doing so with Kentucky in 1996 and Louisville in 2013. In between, his professional resume includes stints with the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, and the Greek club Panathinaikos, for whom he coached prior to resurfacing at Iona. Pitino also directed the Puerto Rican and Greek national teams in the 2010s.