St. John’s sweep of UConn perhaps last hurdle standing between Johnnies and immortality

From L-R: Kadary Richmond, Zuby Ejiofor and RJ Luis carry St. John’s to victory Sunday over UConn. Johnnies are now 24-4 and can clinch Big East regular season this week with two wins or Creighton losses. (Photo by St. John’s Athletics)

NEW YORK — If you watched Sunday’s thorough waxing of UConn and felt like the second half was a preemptive coronation of sorts for St. John’s, you may not be wrong.

All season, the Red Storm has made a name for itself by scoffing at—and ultimately shattering into incomprehensibly small pieces—any cynicism or superlative statistical drought. Why, then, would the second meeting in just over two weeks with Dan Hurley’s Huskies be any different?

For one moment, after UConn trimmed St. John’s 22-point lead down to nine with an early second-half run, it looked like it might. Then Zuby Ejiofor spoke up during a timeout.

“We got in the huddle and Zuby said, ‘look, we’ve battled injuries,” Rick Pitino recalled. “‘We don’t wilt, we’ve been there before, we know what to do.’ I was really proud of that.”

“That’s our captain,” Aaron Scott added. “He keeps us going, the man in the middle, and we all listen to him. He’s correct, we’ve been here before, and we didn’t wilt, we didn’t get down. We just kept going.”

Pitino after a timeout has often proved to be invincible. This time, with Ejiofor leading the way as the voice in his teammates’ ears during the stoppage, the result was similar. St. John’s provided to outscore UConn by a 12-5 margin thereafter, boosting its lead back up to 16 and cruising to its first regular-season sweep of the two-time reigning national champion Huskies since the 1999-2000 season that remains the last in which the Red Storm advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament. 

For good measure, the Johnnies defeated UConn a third time that year, completing the straight-set takedown with a Big East tournament championship. Can St. John’s do the same thing a quarter-century later, completing an agonizing purgatory for a fan base desperately savoring a payoff? Deivon Smith thinks so.

“I think we could win every game,” the senior guard said. “Even the games that we lost, we were hard on ourselves because we’re only losing by a point or so. These are some of our last years and we’re taking advantage of each and every moment. This is a super special team.”

Smith’s attitude, once a topic for discussion when he was benched following the Red Storm’s loss to Georgia in November, has also improved and mirrored those of his fellow players and coaches since then.

“I hate losing just as much as (Pitino),” he deadpanned. “We just try to keep him quiet, honestly.”

Statistically, St. John’s defense this season is two points better—per KenPom—than each of Hurley’s two title-winning outfits of the last two years, which prompted the UConn coach to spend almost half his press conference Sunday extolling the tremendous upside and attention to detail Pitino has cultivated.

“They remind me of Houston with what they do to you defensively and on the glass,” Hurley said. “They’re elite. They’ve got a championship-level defense, championship-level offensive rebounding, and how their season goes from here is going to, for a large part, come down to being able to make enough shots. It’s hard to prepare for their physicality and their defense. When you have a defense like that, it’s tough to beat.”

“They’ve got, it feels like, three first-teamers (Ejiofor, RJ Luis and Kadary Richmond) and two guys that are getting in each other’s way to get the (player of the year) award. The pressure’s one thing—obviously it’s disconcerting starting your possession just surviving to get the ball inbounds versus the pressure—but I don’t even think it’s the full-court pressure with them. I just think it’s the positionless switching that they’re able to do, and what makes it obviously work is just having all these big wings that are grown men. And then Ejiofor gets on the guards and it’s hard to take advantage of that.”

Add to that a 24-4 team that will be knocking on the door of the Top 5 in the polls, and a crowd that has consistently made its presence known and heard in a bold and brash fashion for the first time since Chris Mullin was in charge several years ago—maybe even longer—and you have a connection on both ends of the floor and in the stands.

“Coach P told us, it’s been 40 years since a St. John’s team won a Big East (regular season) championship,” Aaron Scott told reporters Sunday. “We’re just taking it game by game and getting better. Everybody bought in. You could see on the defensive end that we’re all connected, and we turn our defense into offense.”

“I thought we played our best game of the season,” Pitino later said. “But when you get into the Big East tournament and you get into the NCAA Tournament, it becomes all matchups, all styles. You gotta change a lot going into the tournament because the film work is so extensive, so you’re gotta make your tweaks on offense and defense, but it’s all matchups. You hope for good matchups, we hope we get a great seed, we hope we finish this thing out and play great basketball.”

Sunday’s game also marked the first time since UConn’s return to the Big East in which the Johnnies had the clear advantage among the gallery, something Pitino praised while also taking playful aim at his program’s biggest rival.

“I can assure you, we had most of the fans,” he declared. “We did not last year, but it was about 70/30 this year. (UConn fans) are a great fan base, they’re like Kentucky, the Kentucky of the East. They travel great, they show up, but our fans were there in a big way.”

“And we’re gonna play next year’s game at Carnesecca,” he quipped, a dog whistle of sorts to exhort more Red Storm fans to support the team through what remains in a dream season from which no one has awakened, or may not want to, for that matter.

That dream season continues on Wednesday when St. John’s heads to historic Hinkle Fieldhouse to take on Butler, followed by hosting Seton Hall at Madison Square Garden and a trip to Marquette. And while Pitino professes his players are fixated on one game at a time, one possession at a time, the legendary coach allowed himself to be selfish just for a moment, setting his sights on something bigger. The Big East regular season championship, something that has not come back to New York since 1985, can be had with a combination of two wins or Creighton losses. Pitino wants it, and made no secret of that Sunday.

“We’ve got three games left,” he intoned. “We want this Big East crown badly, not only for the players, but for the fans who came back like I never expected. We’re very excited about being in the hunt. Winning the Big East would mean a lot. We’ve gotta win these games to get this Big East crown.”