Rick Pitino swears the all-white suit and the white shoes are going back in the closet for a while, that he wasn’t even going to break that baby out Sunday afternoon until his wife insisted he comply with the white-out promotion, where white T-shirts were waiting on the seatbacks for all 12,061 customers at Madison Square Garden.
So Saturday, Pitino hoofed it a couple of blocks to his friendly Armani dealer. And Sunday he trotted out courtside looking like John Lennon leading the Beatles across the street on the ���Abbey Road” album cover.
“We knew,” Glenn Taylor Jr. said with a laugh, “that we had to win when he came out with that suit.”
Credit the outfit if you’d like. More relevant to the Johnnies’ inspired 80-66 win over 15th-ranked Creighton was what the players themselves did across the 40 best minutes of their season. It’s no secret that St. John’s has played all year with a limited margin for error; Sunday, it solved that dilemma by playing with virtually no errors, period.
The Johnnies had 24 assists and only three turnovers, which is about as perfectly as the game can be played offensively. They got heroic efforts from Taylor (10 rebounds), Daniss Jenkins (27 points, six dimes) and Jordan Dingle (18 points on 8-for-13 shooting). Defensively they harassed the Bluejays and on multiple occasions forced them into heaves at the shot-clock buzzer.
More tellingly, after the Bluejays twice erased double-digit leads the Johnnies had answers each time, in ways they haven’t as so many second-half cushions have dissolved on them this season.
“It’s amazing to see a game like this,” Jenkins said. “It’s about time.”
Is it too late? The truth of the calendar says it may be, since the Johnnies are running out of games. Sunday’s win ought to strengthen their NET rating (49 coming in) but their three remaining games are against the Big East teams with the three lowest NET numbers: Butler (63), Georgetown (198) and DePaul (320). That won’t help.
What will?
Well, two things will. If Sunday was more a revelation than an aberration, that would be nice. As Creighton coach Greg McDermott said when asked if he thought the Johnnies were an NCAA team:
“I did today. Anybody that watched did today. This league is unforgiving but [St. John’s] can beat anybody on any given night.”
And that brings us to No. 2, which could be the biggest takeaway from Sunday. Beating a top-15 team in Creighton — just five days after Creighton had blown to bits top-ranked Connecticut — ought to provide the Johnnies with, at the very least, some positive muscle memory how to take out top teams at the Garden.
Big East teams have fretted for years — for decades, really — that St. John’s might actualize what has seemed an overwhelming advantage for years: no matter how good or bad a year is, they get every season’s most important games on their alternate home floor. And they’ve almost never seized that moment. A thoroughly average Georgetown team did a few years ago. UConn and Syracuse have done it, and as those tournaments progressed the Garden quite easily morphed to Gampel Pavilion West and Carrier Dome South.
Yet St. John’s has expired, quietly, year after year, even in those outlier years when they had a reasonable chance to make a run.
If they could do that this year, that may be their last fighting chance, even if they’re almost certain to have to rattle off four wins in four nights to win the title. But if they can win out in the regular season and then, say, beat DePaul in the first round and Creighton in the quarters? That gets them to 21 wins, with another Quad-1. At the very least, it gets them back in the conversation, maybe on the right side of the fence for a trip to Dayton.
“They got a chance today to see what great basketball looks like,” Pitino said of his team’s superb two hours at the Garden, under the bright lights, before an engaged crowd that was determined to carry them to the finish. “We have to emulate that again and again. Is it too late? Who knows?”
Pitino can do his part. Hey, Lou Carnesecca only donned that ratty old sweater of his on Jan. 14, 1985, because it was freezing that night in Pittsburgh and his wife, Mary, insisted he prevent a cold from becoming the flu. St. John’s won that night. They beat top-ranked Georgetown 12 days later. They kept winning — 13 in a row with the sweater! — before they lost again. Looie knew better than to question his wife’s formula, or her instincts.
Thirty-nine years later, maybe Pitino should do the same.
