Dillon Mitchell (1) finishes second-half dunk as St. John’s completed 15-point comeback Tuesday with win over Seton Hall. (Photo by St. John’s Athletics)
NEW YORK — Rick Pitino’s latest motivation was a rhetorical question.
The hall of fame coach, master tactician and unrivaled king of conveying messages picked the brains of his roster before Tuesday’s game against Seton Hall. What exactly did the Red Storm’s leader want to know?
His players’ most favored trait of Zuby Ejiofor, their senior teammate, whose hustle is praised fondly and effusively on a near-everyday basis around the program.
“I asked the guys before the game: ‘What do you admire most about Zuby?’ Pitino recalled. “And they all said, ‘he just outworks everybody.’ I said, ‘well, I gotta get 13 guys that outwork everybody like Zuby in order for us to progress at the level we want to get to.”
Message, once again, received. Except this latest execution required more of a relentless fight.
Trailing Seton Hall by 15 with 16 minutes remaining in regulation, St. John’s looked overmatched by the scrappy Pirates, who jumped on the offensive glass and used their physicality and fearlessness to build an advantage that, coupled with the Johnnies’ offensive struggles, looked insurmountable.
Until Dillon Mitchell, arguably the team’s most valuable player this season for his knack to provide value and plays that affect winning no matter the situation, stepped in and willed the Red Storm back.
With Ejiofor in foul trouble and Bryce Hopkins laboring harder as a result, Mitchell posed a matchup problem for Seton Hall. With his presence on the floor, the 15-point deficit was quickly whittled down to seven. Then five. Then three, then one, until his basket with just under five minutes remaining in regulation put St. John’s ahead for good.
“It’s just playing as hard as you can,” Mitchell said of his refusal to give in. “That’s the main thing. It was nothing special that we did, it was nothing that we drew up or something like that. It was just playing hard, getting stops on defense. At that point, down 15, you’ve got nothing else to lose. You gotta go out there and try to get back in the game, and that’s what we did.”
“The coaches have been telling us, even before the game, what it’s gonna take to win this game, to stop (Seton Hall). In the first half, we didn’t listen, we didn’t do none of those things. The second half, we just had to stay together. We got a little frustrated, but we stayed together, we locked in on what we had to do. We just went out there and played our hearts out, left it all on the court.”
The Texas and Cincinnati transfer does not have the gaudiest statistics, as evidenced by his standing as the fifth-leading scorer with an average of just over nine points per game. However, his 59 percent shooting is a team best, and his intangibles have caught the eye of a fellow veteran who has seen many players come and go during his time.
“We see it every day, what he brings to this team,” Hopkins said of Mitchell. “His energy, his athleticism, how vocal he is with us in timeouts and stuff like that. He’s impacted us in a tremendous way. We love being out there in that lineup with Dillon out there with us, and I feel like we’re playing some really good basketball right now. The ball’s moving, guys are playing confident, not pressing.”
Since being inserted into the starting lineup on January 6, Mitchell is averaging nearly ten points per game to go with nine rebounds, three assists and a collective 19-for-35 mark from the floor in St. John’s five-game win streak. More importantly, his competitive spirit has trickled down the bench to the rest of his teammates, with a revelation of sorts coming Tuesday night as the Johnnies began what would eventually be a 33-13 run to close out Seton Hall.
“I think we’ve discovered that there’s no quit in us,” Hopkins shared, harkening back to Mitchell’s nothing-to-lose mentality. “As (Pitino) stated, we didn’t come out how we wanted to in the first half, and I think the discussion between me and the guys was, who’s gonna be the tougher team? Are we just gonna fall down and keep getting punched, or are we gonna get back up and throw our punch? And I feel like that was the biggest thing we did coming out of halftime, even if we started out a little slow in the second half. At the 15-minute mark, I feel like something clicked with the guys. We all came together and we decided to play every possession like it was our last, and just rallied around that to just keep building that momentum.”
Pitino expounded on that never-say-die mantra, sharing the rationale behind his assertion that the Red Storm had its back to the wall after losing to Providence on January 3.
“I said our backs were to the wall because they were, and I wanted my team to feel that,” he explained. “I wanted my team to understand this could happen at any point in time. You’re gonna face certain nights that are not your night, but you’ve gotta dig in and find a way to win. You’re down 15, don’t worry about it. You’re getting down. Don’t get down, get up, possession by possession. Make the plays offensively, get the offensive plays, get the defensive rebounds, play by play. Dig in. It’s not your night, (but) it will be our night with a victory, so just dig in. And they did.”
The innate desire and pursuit of perfection, and not settling for anything less, has been a common characteristic of almost every team Pitino has shepherded over a half-century of basketball. Sometimes nothing is good enough to satisfy someone who has seen it all over 1,000-plus games on the sideline. On Tuesday, an exception was made.
“These guys keep getting better and better and better. Seton Hall’s a tough-ass team to play against. And we had to pull a Seton Hall to win this game.”
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