St. John’s needs to put it all together now — starting against DePaul
Anyone who watched this team all year knows there is another team loitering, lurking and fully capable of disrupting the weekend.
nypost.com
By Mike Vaccaro
Mike Anderson's St. John's team will have to go on a miracle run this weekend.
Corey Sipkin
Basketball coaches love to play the role of amateur shrinks. They do it all the time. In “Hoosiers,” when Ollie’s about to take the most important free throws of his life, Norman Dale pulls out a trick coaches from CYO to the Celtics have tried going back to the beginning of time: he sets up a defense for when Ollie make the free throws, not if.
Mike Anderson has decided to borrow another gem from the coaching medicine cabinet.
“I’ve got four outfits,” he said Tuesday.
He smiled as he said this, but he was as serious as a tax audit, of course. Because St. John’s gets one last chance to salvage a disappointing season starting Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, first round of the Big East Tournament, facing off against their sister Vincentian school, DePaul. If they are to crash the NCAA Tournament it will require four wins in four nights.
Hence, four changes of clothes.
“Everyone is zero and zero,” Anderson said. “We’re looking forward to this tournament. The winner gets the automatic bid and that’s our goal. That’s our quest.”
It didn’t have to come to this, but that’s all prologue now. It’s all prelude. Anderson pieced together a pillow-soft preseason schedule that meant the Johnnies were going to have to do their most damage in the Big East, except that never quite happened, not enough. They come into this tournament 16-14 overall, having lost 11 of their 19 Big East games.
“We know,” Julian Champagnie said, “that it’s win or go home.”
Logically, everyone else knows that this is more of a fool’s errand than a true quest. But there are a few things that St. John’s has on its side. For one thing, it was only a year ago that Georgetown entered the tournament 10-12 and all but buried … except it proceeded to blow out Marquette, squeak by Villanova, handle Seton Hall and absolutely obliterate Creighton on four consecutive nights to steal the league’s automatic bid and craft a perfect blueprint for precisely what St. John’s must do — right down to beating Villanova in Round 2 if they can survive DePaul.
St. John’s has other advantages, of course, but they have those advantages every year. The Big East Tournament is, essentially, a St. John’s home game whenever the Johnnies are playing. The fact it has only rarely been kind to them for most of the last 35 years is as stinging an indictment of where the program has tumbled as anything else.
But the fact is, it’s still the Garden. It’s still New York. And no matter how many Villanova or Seton Hall or Providence fans are in the building, it’s still going to feel like Utopia Parkway in a close game, under two minutes to play. Some year, that’s going to matter.
Maybe next year can be this year.
“Maybe it’s our time,” Anderson said.
There is this, too: St. John’s is exactly the kind of team the top-tier teams, the ones with NCAA bids already locked up, want no part of this weekend. The Johnnies’ 94-foot style is uncomfortable on any court, but especially the Garden’s. And the Johnnies will have the advantage of desperation on their hands against just about anyone they play.
(Assuming they can survive DePaul, anyway.)
“We have no choice,” Anderson said. “If we’re going to get in, we’ve got to win it.”
You can call this a lot of things: fantasy, delusion, pipe dreams. The St. John’s team that scuffled most of the year will be lucky to make it to Thursday. But anyone who watched this team all year knows there is another team loitering, lurking and fully capable of disrupting the weekend. That version humiliated Seton Hall at Walsh Gym, twice lost heartbreakers to UConn, gave Villanova plenty to think about until the very end at the Garden.
Maybe that version of this team is destined to stay hidden. Or maybe, as the man with four outfits said, it’s their time. Their turn.
“There comes a time when it all comes together,” Mike Anderson said. “And this would be the perfect time to come together.”
No need to save it for the NIT.
