What’s gone wrong for St. John’s? A closer look at Pitino's defense

Rick Pitino looks on as St. John’s battles Michigan at Madison Square Garden. (Photo by Vincent Dusovic/St. John’s Athletics)

NEW YORK — Following an 86-80 loss to Boston College that straddled the borderline between catastrophic and eyebrow-raising, Rick Pitino — as is normally the case over his Hall of Fame career — was not one to mince words when assessing the state of a Red Storm team that fell to 6-3 on the year after Sunday’s setback at Barclays Center.

“We are not going to win until we get committed to defense,” Pitino said as he began a scathing indictment on the afflictions that have plagued a St. John’s team cobbled together through the transfer portal. “And this group is not. It’s partially our fault. We recruited offensive basketball players (and we’re) trying to teach 23-year-olds about defense, and it cost us because if you take all the offensive rebounds and the fact that (Boston College) shot 50-something percent, they’re almost scoring every time down the floor.”

“We’re trying to win with offense, and you can’t win with offense. With a 10-point lead, you’ve gotta play great defense and we didn’t, so we paid for it.”

After a Joel Soriano dunk extended St. John’s lead to 52-42 and punctuated a 14-0 run in the early stages of the second half, the Red Storm was outscored by a commanding 44-28 margin over the final 14:55. It wasn’t 7-foot Dutch big man Quinten Post doing the damage, either, as BC head coach Earl Grant used a relentless backcourt attack to stifle St. John’s guards and capitalize off the Eagles’ edge in speed. All told, St. John’s surrendered a torrid 1.57 points per possession (44 points in 28 possessions over the final 14:55 following Soriano’s dunk). To compound the defensive woes, the Red Storm allowed a staggering 86.7 effective field goal percentage to BC, a number enhanced by the Eagles having made four of their six 3-point attempts in the telltale time span.

“When you have a 10-point lead, you’re not supposed to lose it,” a firm Pitino bluntly stated. “It’s very difficult, but it’s been difficult from the summer to now with defense. It’s a broken record. We’re pressing like I want most of the time, (but) the halfcourt defense is abominable, just abominable. Such a disappointment.”

When Pitino and his staff overhauled the roster shortly after being installed in March, they quickly scoped out players to best fit a system that has consistently produced teams that ranked among the ten best scoring defenses in the nation. Presently, the Johnnies stand 127th in that category, per Ken Pomeroy’s rankings. That number, if it does not improve, would be the lowest full-season ranking for a Pitino defense since KenPom was established in the 2001-02 season.

It is also worth noting that prior to his recent stint at Iona, where the Gaels ranked 146th in a COVID-abbreviated 2020-21 season before improving to 105th and 74th the next two years, Pitino had only once presided over a defense not ranked within the top 50, his 2009-10 Louisville team that finished 78th. When asked Sunday if the maladies could be attributed to not having the right personnel to fit his schematics, Pitino dismissed that notion, instead chalking it up to a combination of transitioning to a new style of play in year one as well as again citing a lack of commitment to defensive principles.

“I have good enough athletes, but defense is a matter of will,” he said. “You’ve gotta want to play defense, so if you make a change and you tell a guy to blitz and he stays behind him, it’s frustrating. But that’s what the first year is, it’s all frustrations and that’s what you get. It’s not young players not being committed to defense, it’s the entire team. It’s very difficult.”

Daniss Jenkins, Pitino’s point guard at Iona last season who followed him from New Rochelle to Queens, has been an indispensable conduit between twelve newcomers — eight of whom are underclassmen — and the only coach in NCAA history to win national championships at two schools. Heralded for his defense, the fifth-year senior kept St. John’s ahead approaching the stretch drive, Jenkins picked up his third and fourth fouls 41 seconds apart with just over seven minutes remaining and the Red Storm up four. When he re-entered the game 74 seconds later, Boston College had already retaken a lead it would not relinquish, the damage having already been inflicted.

“It’s like a ship without a captain when he goes out of the game,” Pitino said of Jenkins. “That’s a problem because he plays defense, he gives 100 percent effort on defense.”

“I’ll say it again: I think we’ve got people that have not guarded in their life, and they’re being expected to defend rather than just score. It’s very difficult on them. We’re gonna continue to work at it. We let this one get away, and it’s obvious we’ve played defense against certain opponents and came away with nice victories, and (Sunday), we did not. We paid the price, we took an L.”

Unfortunately for St. John’s, most of its defensive highlights have come against lesser competition. But what stands out as arguably the Red Storm’s best effort on that side of the basketball is its 53-52 win over North Texas on November 16 in the Charleston Classic, the one game of the nine St. John’s has played to date in which it did not dictate tempo and had to adjust to playing on its opposition’s terms. In that chess match with the Mean Green, owners of the 33rd-best defense in the country and best in the American Athletic Conference, St. John’s held North Texas to 32 percent shooting and 0.83 points per possession. In the first half, which ended in a 30-20 lead for the Johnnies, North Texas was just 8-of-29 from the floor and registered a scant 0.69 PPP. In other words, the potential is there.

However, only 24 hours later, the Red Storm followed with an equally confounding performance in an 88-81 loss to Dayton, as the Flyers shot 52 percent from the floor on the day and made a living at the free throw line in the second half. Aside from the 88.9 percent free throw rate yielded over the final 20 minutes, St. John’s also conceded 1.60 points per possession in a 15-4 run that gave Dayton the lead for good. For the entire second half, that figure was 1.32. Following the loss to Anthony Grant’s Flyers, Pitino revealed his players were having difficulty comprehending and following scouting reports, a deficiency he repeated Sunday.

“They don’t absorb scouting,” Pitino said. “That’s the biggest issue. It’s paying attention to the scouting details, and I’ve tried to tell them (that) in the pros, it’s not practice, it’s all scouting and it’s difficult for you guys. So we’ll take our lumps.”

“It’s very disappointing. It’s as disappointing a loss as I’ve had, not because of the score, not because of losing. It’s the way we’re losing. Every one of my teams have been great defensive teams with extraordinary effort, and these guys are just not — they just want to score the ball. And unfortunately, if you do that, you’re not going to be a great basketball team.”

St. John’s is currently ranked 199th in field goal percentage defense, and tied for 269th in 3-point defense, a category on which Pitino and all his protégés over the years have hung their collective hats upon. The common thread between St. John’s three losses is allowing its opposition to shoot at least 38 percent from beyond the arc, something it also did in a 35-point win against a Sacred Heart team that connected on 40 percent of its long-distance calls.

The Red Storm is allowing 1.22 points per possession in losses, compared to 0.92 in its six wins. Equally maddening is the fact that St. John’s has been outshot at the free throw line in all four of its matchups with fellow Power 6 teams, two of whom — Michigan and Boston College — have shot better than 50 percent against the Johnnies. In those four games, St. John’s has allowed a .547 effective field goal percentage and 80 or more points in three of the four, leading some fans to speculate that the mid-major players who transferred up to join Pitino may not be cut out to play at a higher level.

But while the coach shied away from second-guessing the personnel choices he and his staff made in the offseason, he did make one salient point very clear Sunday: If the selective defense and lack of consistency does not improve in the team’s four remaining contests before Big East play resumes after the new year, the visions of grandeur the fan base laid out upon Pitino's hire will need to be placed on the proverbial back burner until the exorbitant standards of the master tactician are met.

“We’re stuck with what we have,” Pitino said of his roster, a quote that was intended more as frustration with the results to date than as a slight toward the potential of his players. “It’s the first year, and we’re going to go through the pains the first year. And hopefully by Big East time, they’re going to learn, but they’re not gonna win playing this type of defense. I don’t care what they shoot, they’re not going to win.”