Feb 23, 2025; New York, New York, USA; St. John’s Red Storm head coach Rick Pitino signals in the second half against the Connecticut Huskies at Madison Square Garden. Mandatory Credit: Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images When No. 7 St. John’s beat Butler on Wednesday night, the Red Storm clinched at least a share of the Big East title for the first time since 1992.
Cue Rick Pitino: “We are not interested in sharing anything.”
St. John’s is getting the full Pitino experience: an unmistakable personality, some eye-catching quotes for better or worse, and a whole lot of winning.
Maybe we all should have seen this coming. You can make the argument that no modern coach does a better job of instilling his ethos into a new program and getting near-immediate results.
All of his teams, from Providence to Kentucky to Louisville and even Iona, made a dramatic jump between Year 1 and Year 2, as documented here by college basketball mensch Trilly Donovan. At St. John’s, Pitino’s first season ended with a 20-13 record and an NCAA Tournament snub—not the worst place to start.
Now the Red Storm are 25-4 and a realistic candidate for the Final Four.
Think back to Feb. 18, 2024, when St. John’s blew a 19-point lead at home to lose to Seton Hall. Pitino laid into his players postgame.
“We are so nonathletic that we can’t guard anybody without fouling,” Pitino said, before naming five of his players and calling them “slow laterally” or “physically weak.”
It felt brutal at the time. You do that behind closed doors, not at the microphone, some declared (I may have been among them). But the wiser among us could recognize a motivational tactic when they saw one.
Since that day, St. John’s has gone a ridiculous 31-5. Talk about a turning point.
Granted, this year’s group is far different than last year’s. Such is life in the transfer portal era. But Pitino has proven well-equipped for that. At Big East media day, he didn’t hesitate to speak about the money being on the table now instead of under it.
However you feel about his past or his persona, this is a man who knows how to attract talent. And then he squeezes out their full potential.
This season, he pieced together an all-transfer backcourt of Kadary Richmond, Deivon Smith and Aaron Scott while building up Zuby Ejiofor into a real threat on the block (from 4.3 points and 3.1 rebounds per game last year to 14.0 ppg and 8.1 rpg now). Then there’s captain RJ Luis Jr. on the wing, the leading scorer who does a little of everything well.
VICE cameras shooting a documentary series captured Pitino giving his players a fiery halftime speech earlier this season when they were losing to Providence. Free from digs about physical weakness and lateral slowness, it was a message about learning how to handle adversity instead of wilting in the face of it. St. John’s held Providence to 28 points in the second half of that game and won 72-70 on Ejiofor’s last-second shot.
His players were fired up, but Pitino’s son Richard, the coach at New Mexico, had a different reaction. “PTSD of the time I didn’t make my bed,” he wrote on X.
Like father, like son. They’ll keep the quips coming, and the wins to back them up.
