Seton Hall's NET was 66 prior to the USC's victory yesterday. We had two Quad 3 losses yesterday morning and have only one this morning, as USC's win moved them from a NET of 105 to a NET of 97. Despite going from two Quad 3 losses down to just one, our NET didn't budge.

These metrics make no sense to me.

Since nov 1, 9 people exchanged, only one dismissed...picking from the george santos staff scraps to fill out the roster...called staff near midnight on christmas eve to find out why she doesn't have more TV time during holiday week

Anyone looking to sell 3?

Johnson, Scalise may not have to worry about reelection but many of their GOP colleagues in the house do.

1. Connecticut
Could go 19-1

2. Marquette
Separating from Creighton with 5 game winning streak

3. Creighton
Bad loss to Butler at home

4. Butler
Or was it

5. Seton Hall
After Georgetown the proof will be in the pudding

6. Villanova
5 game losing streak came to an end in blowout of Providence

7. St. John's
Just not ready for prime time yet. But 4 games against the dregs will inflate the record

8. Xavier
Home game on tap against Nova will be interesting

9. Providence
The upcoming schedule is going to bury Providence

10. Georgetown
Thank God for DePaul

11. DePaul
0-20!!!!

Of WW2 Chaplain John Patrick Washington from Seton Hall, Class of 1935 as chronicled in SHU’s instagram page. He and 3 other chaplains gave their lives to save others.

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Kenpom

Throughout the day I will be updating this thread

18:34 - 1st

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  #1 UConn
  3
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  3

They look lost. Both will be 5-6 when Nova wins.

Hoyas in serious danger of getting doubled up at home with 8 to go…woof. About to be 1-9 with only a 3 point win home over Depaul.

Their fans were ready to hang a banner after only losing by single digits at providence, but it’s clear Cooley has a ton of work to do before they’re even close to relevant.

We have hit the halfway point of the Big East season as 55 of the 110 scheduled games are now in the books. Eight players went a perfect 4-0 this week but one of those was not our leader, @GrMtWoods, whose lead has been trimmed to two games over @vegaspaul82. Paul is on a hot streak of his own, with 11 straight wins. In fact, he is 42-5 since starting the season 3-5. All that said, our leader is still an astounding 47-8, picking 85% of the games to date correctly. @hallball is in solo third at 44-11 and five players are still within striking distance at 43-12.

It's a much tighter leaderboard throughout than in previous seasons, with 19 of our 21 players at 40-15 or better. Can someone from the back of the pack catch fire in the second half, or will our front runners continue to hold it down?


Friday, February 2

Butler (13-7, 5-5) @ #13 Creighton (16-5, 7-3) - 9:00 PM - FS1 - CHI/Omaha

Saturday, February 3

#1 Connecticut (19-2, 9-1) @ St. John's (13-8, 5-5) - 12:00 PM - FOX - MSG/NYC
#9 Marquette (16-5, 7-3) @ Georgetown (8-12, 1-8) - 2:00 PM - FS1 - CapOne/DC
Xavier (11-10, 5-5) @ DePaul (3-18, 0-10) - 9:30 PM - FS1 - Wintrust/Chicago

Sunday, February 4

Providence (14-7, 5-5) @ Villanova (11-10, 4-6) - 6:00 PM - FS1 - Wells Fargo/Philly

I still think we deserve some better love for being UCONN's ONLY BE loss and only 2nd of the whole season...... 19-2 (1 from The Hall) show us love

To date

1. Hurley
Coming off a national championship he might be in line for another.

2. Holloway
A bad whistle or two from being 8-3 in conference.

3. Matta
Butler, 14-7 5-5. Kudos

4. English
You lose Hopkins for the season and you're still competitive.

5. Miller
Preseason injuries ruined the season but the team is still a tough out.

6. Pitino
I expected more but another team ravaged by injuries

7. McDermott
Tough call. But really, just meeting preseason expectations and no more.

8. Smart
Same as McDermott

9. Neptune
Hot seat?

10. Cooley
Just doesn't have the horses. Only conference win home to DePaul and just barely.

11. Stubblefield
Long gone and he earned it.

By Mike Vaccaro

For a fair chunk of Saturday afternoon, you didn’t even need to see the basketball game taking place on the floor of Madison Square Garden.

For the first 28 or so minutes, as St. John’s desperately tried to look Connecticut’s Huskies in the eye, you could’ve closed your own eyes for long stretches of time, simply listened to the wonderful symphony of old-school Big East ball, let it take you away.

“I got goose bumps during the anthem,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said.

“A great atmosphere for a college basketball game,” St. John’s coach Rick Pitino agreed.

Of course, once you opened your eyes again what you saw shouldn’t have surprised you. The Huskies are the No. 1-ranked team in the sport right now, and that’s nice. They are also one of a small handful of teams who can expect to still be playing on the final weekend of the season in Phoenix come April. That’s better.

“They’re better than us,” Pitino said with a shrug, and that four-word summary really does tell much of the story of this 77-64 victory for UConn, now 20-2, which managed to roll on despite the absence of Alex Karaban.

They may have shared an area code — 212 — and a ZIP code — 10001 — for 2 hours and 3 minutes, but the Huskies and Johnnies reside in far different properties within the college basketball grid.

Connecticut has already scaled its highest summit, and is now merely defending what it has, and what it’s had five times in the last 25 years.

St. John’s is still at a staging area at the base of that mountain. It is a flawed team ensnared in the toughest part of its schedule, and it’s showed. It’s lost five out of six, and only the Xavier game from last week stands out as one that felt like a whiff.

The Red Storm are still a team that controls its NCAA Tournament destiny, but whatever margin of error they once had as recently as two weeks ago is gone. They need to start winning games.

Playing DePaul, maybe the worst of all Power-6 teams, is a helpful start Tuesday. But there are eight games waiting thereafter. It’s hard to believe they’d still be on the right side of the bubble if they win any fewer than five of them.

“I think we come close a lot,” Pitino said, and he’s right — the Johnnies have been right there with Creighton and with Marquette, and went to the final minute when they played UConn the first time, in Hartford.

“They’re No. 1 in the country. They’re better than us,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t beat the No. 15 team, though. We hope to get there someday.”

That’s for then.

For now, there is the reality that St. John’s resides squarely in the Big East’s coach section, the curtain fully drawn between them and the triumvirate of Huskies, Bluejays and Golden Eagles easing their seats back in first class.

It means having to get to the other side of this. It means — minimum — sweeping the four games still to come against league dregs DePaul and Georgetown, it means needing to probably take two out of three of the games left against Providence, Seton Hall and Butler, all of whom they will be closely judged alongside on Selection Sunday.

And it would be helpful to steal one of the two remaining games against the conference heavyweights left on the schedule — either at Marquette next Saturday or home to Creighton on Feb. 25.

Really, what it mostly means is this: They need to start playing better. They were good enough for 28 minutes Saturday afternoon, and for that stretch the Garden sure felt like a damn fine home-court advantage.

The final 12 sounded like Gampel Pavilion South, which is exactly how it’s supposed to sound when there’s 19,812 people and two rooting interests in the house.

“This program here is well on its way to competing at the top of the league,” Hurley, always a gracious winner, said of St. John’s. “There will be some great battles over the course of the next couple of years here. I look forward to it.”

Pitino, equally gracious in defeat, made a point of reminding everyone — if anyone needed the prompting — that whatever rivalry St. John’s-UConn is must be discussed in the future tense.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere close to being a rivalry,” he said. “This could become a rivalry someday. It isn’t now.”

It isn’t. But for 28 minutes Saturday afternoon, you could close your eyes, let your ears do all the work, and let it take you away to a day when it certainly could be. For now, that’ll have to be enough.

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Guess they aren’t used to having a mediocre season.

If anyone watched him against the Hall this is not that surprising.




Jalen Brunson is the Knicks, and the Knicks are him.

Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said precisely that about Jimmy Butler during the playoffs last spring, and that quote feels completely applicable to the massive impact Brunson, the first-time All-Star point guard, is having as the Knicks continue to zoom up the Eastern Conference standings with nine straight wins entering Saturday’s game against the Lakers.

“A lot of guys play the game of basketball in this league. He competes to win. That’s a different language,” Spoelstra said of Butler after the eighth-seeded Heat defeated the top-seeded Bucks in the first round of the playoffs last spring. “He’s desperate and urgent and maniacal and sometimes psychotic about the will to try to win.

“He’ll make everybody in the building feel it. And that’s why he is us and we are him.”

Julius Randle also was named an All-Star for the third time in four years, giving the Knicks two players headed to the league’s showcase in-season event for the first time since 2013, although the power forward will need to be replaced on the East roster due to his dislocated right shoulder.

Tom Thibodeau, meanwhile, was named the East’s top coach in January with the Knicks posting a 14-2 mark amid various injuries, and the team’s supporting players absolutely have stepped up in those absences.

Still, no one defines the Knicks’ transformation into legitimacy and their return to league relevancy more than Brunson, as a player, a competitor, a leader and the team’s unquestioned engine.

Just as Butler fulfills all of those traits with the Heat, who ousted the Knicks in the second round of the 2023 playoffs on their way to a loss in the NBA Finals to the Nuggets.

Thibodeau, who coached Butler with the Bulls and the Timberwolves, was an assistant when Brunson’s father, Rick, played for the Knicks, bridging the new millenium.

Rick Brunson has been a member of Thibs’ coaching staffs in Chicago, Minnesota and New York — meaning Thibodeau has known Jalen Brunson for most of the point guard’s life.

“It’s surreal. I think back to when he was a kid coming here in the ’90s, and you never know,” Thibodeau said after Brunson scored 40 points in the undermanned Knicks’ win Thursday over the Pacers. “You knew he was a great kid. He’s always had that. And he was funny and he was entertaining and he made everyone laugh, but he was so serious, even then, whether he was doing an imitation of Latrell Sprewell or Allan Houston or Larry Johnson or Patrick [Ewing]. And he had it spot-on. He was, like, 6 and he had all their moves down.

“And then following him through high school and then Villanova and then his pro career, each step of the way, there’s always been naysayers. And he always proves them wrong.”

Brunson won two NCAA titles at Villanova, and he spent the first four seasons of his career with the Mavericks, averaging 11.9 points, 4.5 assists and 24.7 minutes over 277 games.

Joined on the Knicks’ roster by former Villanova teammates Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo and Ryan Arcidiacono, Brunson has moved into the top 10 in scoring in the NBA this season at 27.1 points per game, with a career-high 6.4 assists while shooting a career-best 41.7 percent from 3-point range.

The undying adoration and mounting “MVP” chants at MSG actually feel justified suddenly.

“What a feeling it was [Thursday] night being able to see Jalen being announced as [an All-Star] during starting lineups,” Arcidiacono posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter. “Felt like a proud older brother lol. The kid just works and deserves all the love he is getting.”

The Knicks’ defensive effort and rebounding also were stellar Thursday night, but Brunson essentially refused to let his team lose — even with Randle, Mitchell Robinson, OG Anunoby and Quentin Grimes sidelined by injuries against the improved Pacers, another team among the top-six playoff positions in the East.

Brunson, who has netted at least 30 points in eight of his last 10 appearances, scored 11 over the final 6:45, including a game-tying 3-pointer.

He even took a smack to the face late in the fourth quarter without a foul called by the officials.

“The thing that I love about what he does is he just keeps competing,” Thibodeau said. “They were very aggressive in terms of double-teaming, and he didn’t stop moving and he found ways to get the ball back and make plays.

“He scored. He distributed. He just kept going. You just love his competitiveness. He never goes away. The mental part is so, so good, and you can say that for the team. And obviously we’re thrilled about him becoming an All-Star.”