When it was over, Rick Pitino shook Shaheen Holloway’s hand after the Seton Hall Pirates had trucked and trampled Pitino’s St. John’s Red Storm, 68-62. Holloway had taken Pitino to the woodshed across the game’s final 20 minutes, and his team had all but thrown Pitino’s first St. John’s team into a wood chipper.
“This,” Pitino said, “is the most unenjoyable experience of my lifetime.”
He didn’t stop there. He spoke for 15 minutes about the way his assistants had failed their first recruiting test out of last year’s transfer portal, whiffs compounded by the fact that some of Mike Anderson’s players from that team are excelling elsewhere this year — on this day, specifically, Seton Hall’s Dylan Addae-Wusu taking a second helping of revenge against the Johnnies.
He lamented St. John’s “s–tty” facilities, he bemoaned his team’s lack of toughness, he suggested that his assistants had flunked him by failing to import players whose talents were perfect matches for Pitino’s preferred frenetic system. He called out specific players as slow (though he mentioned how much he liked them personally).
And for the first time, St. John’s was forced to witness the flip side of the Pitino coin. Since March, the coach has enjoyed an endless runway of patience and good will. Nobody was necessarily expecting miracles this year, just good reasons to care about the Johnnies again. Mostly, this team delivered that until its recent slide toward the bottom of the Big East.
And mostly, Pitino has been given a pass despite being unable to figure out a system on the fly to keep his team moving forward, despite signing off on all those low-performance players he called out by name Sunday, despite getting routinely outcoached on game days by the likes of Holloway and Kim English and Sean Miller and Danny Hurley.
St. John’s facilities may well be s–tty (which Pitino already knew when he agreed to the job, by the way). But if we’re being honest, so has much of Pitino’s maiden voyage on Utopia Parkway.
“It’s not the job,” Pitino said by way of trying not to dip the entire university in a bucket of sludge. “You could be at Missouri and recruit slow players. Believe me, its not St. John’s. We had to put together a team at the last second. We will never, ever do that again.”
Now, it’s a matter of record that, while Pitino’s entire college-coaching career has been a case study in program rehabilitation, he has never had a complete first-year turnaround. Mostly, he has taken over programs that were dying or decaying — file St. John’s under the latter — and sold a system and a promise in Year 1 before starting to do serious winning in Year 2.
At Boston U., it was 17-9 followed by 21-9 and a regular-season ECAC-North title. At Providence, it was 17-14 followed by 25-9 and a rollicking ride to the Final Four. At Kentucky, it was 14-14 in Year 1, 22-6 and a regular-season SEC title in Year 2. At Louisville, it was 19-13 his first year followed by 25-7 and a Conference USA championship his second. And Iona went from 12-6 (though they did win the MAAC Tournament) in 2021 to 25-8 in ’22.
On one hand, this is exactly the blueprint. The Johnnies are still probably going to hit 18 wins. It is only a delicious irony that, if they do, they will match what Mike Anderson did his final season before being shamefully dismissed for cause so St. John’s could scrape together the shekels to pay Pitino.
It doesn’t mean Pitino has forgotten how to coach. But even the best coaches have tough years. And if you’re going to use Pitino’s past successes as a guide going forward, it should be pointed out — as Pitino himself has helpfully pointed out time and again this year — that this is a different landscape than he negotiated before. NIL makes it so. The transfer portal makes it so. The presence of UConn as an annual supernova makes it so.
Pitino himself never guaranteed an NCAA bid this year, though he did make assurances the team would be better in January than it was in November, and better still in March. The first part of that was correct; not so much the second.
St. John’s also didn’t hire Pitino to win in 2023-24; he was hired to rebuild and reestablish infrastructure, interest, excitement and prosperity in a sleeping giant. He has done the first three; the last is the trickiest. But that will be what’s best remembered, if he’s able to get this program there. It is still awfully hard to bet against that happening.
But Pitino always reacts this way when things don’t go according to his plan, however infrequent that’s been. He didn’t remind St. John’s fans that Chris Mullin, Walter Berry and Mark Jackson won’t soon be “walking through that door;” those fans will settle for the version of Pitino they thought they were getting walking through that door at some point.
It’s just equally sobering to see Pitino go with both feet into the blame game when he is responsible for as much of the disappointment as anyone. Even of what he aired about his players and his coaches has merit, it was still a s–tty thing to do.
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Mike Vaccaro
