PROVIDENCE, R.I. — D’Angelo Harrison was screaming. Sir’Dominic Pointer was pleading. Phil Greene stood speechless.
The desperation of the St. John’s players was palpable, unexpectedly appearing after Providence trimmed a 17-point second-half deficit to three, putting the Red Storm in position to suffer their fourth straight loss to open Big East play. With less than eight minutes to play, three years of disappointment hung overhead, ready once more to crush the dreams of the high-school kids who came to Queens.
The seniors, still with two months to define their careers, weren’t going to let the obituaries begin going to print.
“This is our last year,” Greene said. “We don’t want to go out losing. We want to go out with a bang. We knew it was do or die for us.”
Playing their first game since falling from the top 25, the Red Storm reminded the conference of the team’s potential and poise with an 83-70 win at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center on Wednesday night, knocking off a Friars team which had won eight of its previous nine games.
Harrison and Greene each had a team-high 20 points, with Harrison passing Felipe Lopez to become the third-leading scorer in school history and Greene surpassing 1,000 points for his career. Pointer, who finished with 18 points and eight rebounds, hit 10-of-12 free throws in the second half, despite entering the game shooting below 70 percent.
Harrison, named to the Wooden Award’s Top 25 list prior to the game, played like every possession was his last, demonstrating an unmatched passion which willed the team from repeating last season’s 0-5 start in conference.
“I got a little uptight and I walked over to coach [Steve Lavin] and he was just like, ‘Hey man, we got this,’ ” Harrison said after Providence’s 15-2 run. “I was like, ‘Alright. This is what we do.’
“We were going to do whatever it takes to win this game.”
Jamal Branch was scratched after receiving eight stitches in his left index finger, so Lavin was forced to abandon his customary six-man rotation, a scary prospect that soon yielded more success than the team had seen in weeks.
Deadlocked, following a back-and-forth first 14 minutes, St. John’s was thrown into a scene from one of its dreams: shot after shot went uncontested, landing exactly where it was intended to. Entering the game as the worst 3-point shooting team in the Big East (31.3 percent), the Red Storm (12-4, 1-3) hit eight of their first 12 3-pointers to fuel a late 16-1 first-half run and take a 42-30 lead at the break.
LaDontae Henton, who scored 22 points, and the Friars (13-5, 3-2) battled back behind their 19 offensive rebounds, cutting the deficit to 53-50 in front of the frenzied crowd of 8,000-plus.
It was then that Greene and Harrison buried back-to-back 3-pointers, with Pointer and the two guards scoring the team’s next 24 points, putting the game out of a reach and — at least temporarily — pushing away any panic from a season that seemed like it was slipping away.
“This is one step in the right direction,” Lavin said. “We still have a long way to go.”
But with a much shorter bus ride back to Queens.