St. John’s Basketball Is the Toast of the Town Once Again

The St. John’s Red Storm’s men’s basketball team has made college basketball thrilling again in this town.

Among the greatest accomplishment of St. John’s is that the men’s basketball team has managed to capture the hearts as well as the minds of a basketball-crazed city.

On Saturday, the Johnnies won their first Big East championship since 2000, by dominating the second half and defeating Creighton, 82-66.

Now the No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament, they will be heavily favored to advance to the second round, if not the Elite Eight, when they begin tournament play in Providence, R.I., where the 30-4 squad takes on Omaha at 9:45 p.m. on March 20.

How far can St. John’s go? It seems that this year there is no super team overshadowing the field. Duke and Florida look more formidable than everyone else. But you never know. The tournament has a one-loss-and-out format, which means St. John’s would have to get past such schools as Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas Tech to advance, as well as Florida, the No. 1 team in St. John’s bracket.

Local Heroes

The Johnnies are our local heroes—the best kind of success story. The team seemed to come out of nowhere this season and achieve national prominence, though you couldn’t point to a budding Kobe Bryant or LeBron James on the roster. Duke boasts Cooper Flagg, reputed to be a generational player and the likely first pick in the next NBA draft.

St. John’s acts like a bunch of overachieving college kids who love to play the game and work their butts off. They excel at the time-honored basketball verities that hard-core New York hoops fan admire the most: hustle, passing, defense, and rebounding.

In comparison, just look over the rest of the New York City sports ecosystem.

Forget the playoff-bound Knicks. Hampered by the team’s perennial woes of ill-timed injuries and a subpar bench, the Knicks seem destined to stumble in the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs, as usual.

Yes, Opening Day in Major League Baseball is approaching fast. But the Yankees and Mets, even with Juan Soto, already appear to be fated to come up short because of injuries and the looming October presence of the defending baseball champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Rangers have grossly underperformed this whole season. And don’t get a serious sports fan started on the Giants and the Jets. The less said about these unlovable losers, the better.

Pitino’s Achievement

The Most Valuable Person at St. John’s is the 72-year-old head coach, Rick Pitino, a basketball lifer. He was championship coach at Kentucky in 1997. He has endured his share of ups and downs, to say the least, including his national championship at Louisville 2013 that was later vacated. But he endures.

Pitino has been a New York presence for decades, stretching back to when he valiantly coached the undermanned New York Knicks to overachieve in the late 1980s.

This appearance in March Madness is extra sweet. Under Pitino, in his second season as head coach, the university captured the Big East title for the first time since 1985. That Pitino was awarded the Big East Coach of the Year award was practically an afterthought, after he led the Red Storm to a lofty 29-4 record.

Pitino has also made history by taking his SIXTH school to the tournament.

Pitino has a knack for accomplishing what a smart CEO does. His teams are prepared. They play hard—and together. There is no “I” in a Pitino-coached team. His slavish work ethic is off the charts, and he demands the same sort of dedication from his coaching staff and his players.

The Good Old Days

It’s impossible to watch St. John’s playing so well and not flash back to the mid-1980s. That’s when the late Lou Carnesecca coached St. John’s to national prominence, featuring future NBA great Chris Mullin and his teammates Mark Jackson, Walter Berry, and Bill Wennington. Their battles were legendary against John Thompson’s Georgetown Hoyas, whose star, center Patrick Ewing, went on to star for the Knicks. The Johnnies’ games against Rollie Massimino’s Villanova Wildcats—which won the 1985 national championship in an unlikely upset of the Hoyas—were also epic affairs.

Those were the days!

But you know what? Thanks to the 2024-25 Johnnies, these are the good old days!