An inside look at Rick Pitino’s two-month St. John’s overhaul
The final buzzer of Iona’s season was the starting gun for Rick Pitino.
nypost.com
By Zach Braziller
The final buzzer of Iona’s season was the starting gun for Rick Pitino.
Just five days after Iona’s NCAA Tournament loss to eventual national champion Connecticut in Albany, St. John’s convened the media at Madison Square Garden to announce Pitino as its new head coach.
At the glitzy and full-of-promise press conference, Pitino promised die-hard St. John’s fans that he would restore winning to the dormant program. With this tall order, there was no time to settle in.
Later that afternoon, the new Red Storm coach held his first staff meeting at Wolfgang’s Steakhouse near the Garden. There, he warned them, the work was just beginning. At the time, Pitino said they would need to bring in as many as eight new players, which turned out to be on the light side. It would become 11.
He laid out qualities St. John’s needed to look for in recruits: high-character, athleticism and versatility. But most of all, shooting. Shooting, shooting and more shooting.
“If they can’t shoot,” he told the staff, “I don’t want them.”
And so began 56 days of, as Pitino put it, “chaos.” Nonstop phone calls. One visit stacked onto the next. Twelve recruiting trips to the Garden. Early mornings and late nights. It was so busy Pitino didn’t golf once at Winged Foot in that span — and he owns a house on the famed course.
n less than two months, Pitino built a roster almost from scratch, excluding the return of standout center Joel Soriano. An 11-man recruiting class which experts and rival coaches believe is an NCAA Tournament team on paper and has the potential to snap the Johnnies’ drought without a tournament win that stretches back to 2000. A 10-man transfer class — a group led by Ivy League Player of the Year and the nation’s No. 2 scorer Jordan Dingle (Penn), valuable UConn reserve and three-year Virginia Tech starter Nahiem Alleyene, Iona point guard Daniss Jenkins and talented wings Glenn Taylor Jr. and RJ Luis of Oregon State and Massachusetts, respectively — is ranked fourth nationally by 247Sports.com.
“Stressful and exciting at the same time,” was how assistant coach Van Macon, the lone holdover from the Mike Anderson regime, described it. “Stressful because you’re trying to fill out a roster. It’s exciting because we were involved with some really, really good players and we got some of them.”
Some days, Pitino would start at 5 a.m. with a workout and wouldn’t go to bed until 1 a.m.. There would be up to five conference calls with the staff on the same day. At times they would meet at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar in midtown Manhattan near Pitino’s apartment, as late as midnight after visits.
“The whole thing was chaos,” he recalled. “We’re just racking our brains. What do you think? Where do we stand? Talking to everybody we could talk to because you don’t know where you stand.
“I always say pressure is a good thing, pressure helps you work your ass off. Helps you get up early, stay up late, be innovative and get creative. The pressure on us was enormous.”
It started slowly, a few misses on significant players they pursued. Walter Clayton Jr., Pitino’s best player at Iona and the MAAC Player of the Year, picked Florida over St. John’s. Brooklyn native Chris Ledlum, a standout forward from Harvard, chose Tennessee. Another New Yorker, Notre Dame transfer Cormac Ryan, opted for North Carolina. Key contributors to last year’s team, in particular AJ Storr and Posh Alexander, entered the transfer portal after being offered the opportunity to stay.
There was some disappointment and angst, with fans wondering what was happening the first few weeks. But internally, Pitino and two of his assistants said there wasn’t any doubt. Clayton opting to go home wasn’t a shock. Neither was Ryan picking Chapel Hill over Queens. Ledlum came as somewhat of a surprise. When the staff got word of his decision, Pitino didn’t flinch.
“OK, who’s next? Who do we have to get?” associate head coach Steve Masiello recalled him saying. “What’s our next priority? Who do we have coming in, who do we have to go see?”
The momentum turned during a hectic five-day span when St. John’s hosted seven different recruits for visits, five of whom they landed. There was Brady Dunlap, a top-150 high school recruit and one-time Notre Dame signee. A pair of highly regarded transfer wings, Luis and Taylor. Niagara high-scoring guard Noah Thomasson, high school wing Spencer Mahoney and Iona duo Quinn Slazinski (who had already committed) and Sadiku Ibine Ayo.
Each assistant was assigned to a different player and his family, while Pitino would bounce among them. The toughest part was making sure each player felt valued. Sometimes recruits would have meals together with their families and the staff. There wasn’t enough time to spread out the visits.
Dunlap, an elite-shooting wing, was also considering North Carolina, Villanova, Nebraska and Penn State. After his visit alongside Luis, he was set on St. John’s. His father Jeff, a longtime Division I assistant coach, had always felt Pitino was the best coach in college basketball, which got the Johnnies in the picture. His son said he saw what the hype was about during the trip.