Big East’s elite teams are still a notch above improving St. John’s
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.
nypost.com
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.
