NEW YORK — As midday approached on a chilly winter Saturday in Midtown Manhattan, the group packing Madison Sq. Backyard perked up when Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Thoughts” started to play within the World’s Most Well-known Area.
The star of this school basketball matinee had arrived.
St. John’s coach Rick Pitino, 72 and dapper as ever in a navy blue go well with with white pocket sq., appeared from the tunnel that led to the ground. The scene performed out on the videoboard above the court docket for all to see because the refrain hit its crescendo.
That is the Pitino Impact.
Halfway by means of Pitino’s second yr in cost, St. John’s basketball is an occasion once more. The Pink Storm have but to lose in 2025, having accomplished their first unbeaten January since Lou Carnesecca and Chris Mullin had been the Kings of Queens and Beasts of the Massive East. The Johnnies are recurrently making back-page headlines of the New York tabloids.
On Saturday, with a Windfall crew struggling to remain above break-even on the town, 19,196 confirmed as much as watch the Pink Storm beat the Friars on a pull-up jumper within the waning seconds by Kadary Richmond.
KADARY. RICHMOND. GAME. pic.twitter.com/rfCrEEYxcG
— St. John’s Males’s Basketball (@StJohnsBBall) February 1, 2025
No. 12 St. John’s (19-3, 10-1) enters probably the most attention-grabbing regular-season week this system has had in no less than 25 years — perhaps 40 — alone in first place within the Massive East, with No. 11 Marquette coming to MSG on Tuesday evening and a highway recreation at two-time defending nationwide champion UConn looming on Friday evening.
“If anyone didn’t assume he was the best coach of all time, this (season) at St John’s at 72 and what he’s doing, it simply exhibits you,” Mike Repole, the billionaire businessman and St. John’s alum, informed The Athletic. “All people’s telling you ways robust it’s now. And a whole lot of the older coaches, 55, 60, 65, are getting out, and Rick, he advanced. Wherever he goes, Rick Pitino is a winner.”
St. John’s went all-in on Pitino, giving him one other shot on the massive time after scandal relegated him to 6 years exterior of high-major school basketball. The return on funding has been all the pieces St. John’s might have hoped for thus far.
“We’re watching a residing legend on the sideline,” Repole stated.
Richmond’s game-winner saved St. John’s rolling forward of a pair of key Massive East assessments this week. (Wendell Cruz / Imagn Photographs)
“And your head coach, Corridor of Famer, Rick Pi-teee-noooo!” is how MSG’s public deal with announcer introduces Pitino. That could be an undersell of the top coach’s accomplishments.
Pitino has received two males’s NCAA Match championships, which places him behind John Picket (10), Mike Krzyzewski (5), Adolph Rupp (4), Roy Williams, Jim Calhoun and Bobby Knight (three every) and ties him with Dean Smith, Invoice Self, Denny Crum and Jay Wright, amongst others.
Solely Pitino, although, has received titles at two faculties (Kentucky in 1996 and Louisville in 2013). Solely he and John Calipari have taken three completely different faculties to Closing Fours, together with Pitino’s breakthrough with Windfall in 1987 on the age of 34.
And 38 years later, Pitino is on the best way to turning into the primary coach to guide six completely different faculties to the NCAA Match, with St. John’s set to snap its five-year drought this season.
Like lots of Pitino’s greatest squads, this St. John’s crew appears to be higher than the sum of its components.
Among the many holdovers from final yr’s crew, RJ Luis Jr. is a dependable scorer and Zuby Ejiofor is without doubt one of the greatest offensive rebounders within the nation. Richmond, a Seton Corridor switch who was a first-team all-Massive East choice final yr, is a flexible 6-foot-6 wing who has been discovering his kind through the current surge. The roster’s different marquee switch, level guard Deivon Smith from Utah, returned to motion towards Windfall after lacking 4 video games through the streak with a proper shoulder damage.
“One plus one with Coach Pitino equals 5,” stated former Louisville star Luke Hancock, probably the most excellent participant of the 2013 Closing 4 and now an analyst for the ACC Community. “It doesn’t equal two, like with some coaches, and a part of that’s the perception that he places into you as a participant and as a crew.”
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“I feel Coach has advanced, and I feel this is the reason he’s the best coach in our recreation,” longtime assistant Steve Masiello stated. “As a result of he did it post-NIL, pre-NIL. He’s performed it 18 other ways.”
Although in some ways, the identical method.
Pitino nonetheless runs particular person talent drills along with his gamers within the morning — after he will get in his personal 5 a.m. exercise. He nonetheless coaches with a maniacal consideration to element, particularly on the defensive finish. He calls for relentlessness and toughness, each bodily and mentally, from his gamers, although he goes about getting it a little bit in another way lately.
“I’m as lively as I used to be once I was 35 years of age,” Pitino stated earlier than observe final Friday at MSG. “I’ve softened a bit with my depth, solely as a result of I simply say, ‘How can I get probably the most out of them?’ And yelling and screaming isn’t the best way to do it.”
However a extra mellow Pitino continues to be demanding, and it took the Pink Storm time to regulate.
“Nicely, I feel 12 months 1, he says a whole lot of issues in ways in which individuals took the fallacious method,” stated sophomore ahead Brady Dunlap, who’s out for the season with a core muscle damage that can require surgical procedure. “And I feel that’s what sort of damage our progress early within the yr final yr. And we had been rolling on the finish, as a result of all of us began to know it. And this yr … the returners have actually communicated that to essentially take heed to what he means, not how he says it. And now we’re actually beginning to simply be taught from him and never be offended by what he says typically.”
The Pink Storm appeared to start out getting their coach’s message towards the tip of final season, following a very stinging postgame critique of the roster after a loss to Seton Corridor. They responded by closing the common season on a five-game profitable streak that pushed them into NCAA Match consideration. The season ended with a loss to UConn within the Massive East match, the place they performed the Huskies as competitively as anyone else did final March.
On Saturday, the Johnnies blew a 19-point second half result in Windfall earlier than Richmond’s game-winner with 3 seconds left gave this system its first eight-game profitable streak in Massive East play since 1992.
Pitino appeared to relish the chance after Saturday’s rollicking scene on the Backyard to take his streaking crew down a notch or two in his postgame information convention. He ran by means of a litany of defensive breakdowns — defenders backing off 3-point shooters and turning their backs to gamers they need to have been guarding. He scolded his gamers for permitting their frustrations on the offensive finish to affect defensive effort.
It was classic Pitino.
“I don’t really feel good proper now due to the best way we performed the sport. So tomorrow I’ll have a significantly better angle. Be joyful we received. You understand, I’ll drink a bottle of Jameson,” he stated, rapidly including that he’s not consuming.
In only a season and a half, Pitino has Pink Storm followers dreaming of their first Massive East crown in many years. (Wendell Cruz / Imagn Photographs)
As a teen, Repole would take the subway from Queens to look at the best St. John’s groups, with Mullin, Walter Berry and Invoice Wennington, from the nosebleed blue seats on the Backyard.
“I by no means even considered going away to varsity,” Repole stated. “However St. John’s was like going away. It was a nationwide faculty.”
Now Repole flies in from Florida for video games and sits courtside, proper subsequent to Pitino.
Repole, who based the corporate that makes Vitaminwater and owns thoroughbred horses that run in Triple Crown races, had grown pissed off with how his beloved alma mater’s basketball program had floundered by means of a lot of this century. St. John’s has made solely three NCAA Match appearances since coach Mike Jarvis was fired through the 2003-04 season.
In a memorable interview on highly effective New York sports activities radio station WFAN with Mike Francesa in 2019, Repole ripped St. John’s higher-ups, whom he felt had botched quite a few alternatives to rent then-up-and-coming coaches corresponding to Dan Hurley when he was with Rhode Island.
With new management at St. John’s in 2023, Repole pushed for the varsity to go after Pitino after the firing of Mike Anderson.
It was a transfer met with some scrutiny and skepticism. Pitino’s profession is dotted with each skilled and private scandals.
The 2013 NCAA championship was later vacated after an investigation discovered an assistant coach paid escorts and unique dancers to entertain gamers and recruits in campus dorms. There have been additionally private improprieties revealed throughout a felony case towards a lady who was discovered responsible of making an attempt to extort Pitino whereas he was at Louisville. And earlier than Pitino might serve his five-game suspension for the sooner NCAA case, he was fired by Louisville in 2017 when this system was implicated within the FBI’s investigation into corruption in school basketball.
Ultimately, Pitino was cleared of wrongdoing for violations revealed by the FBI case.
“Yeah, certain, there’s some reputational danger due to issues which have occurred earlier than, however I feel Rick is at some extent in his life the place he’s discovered from issues which have occurred up to now,” St. John’s president Fr. Brian Shanley informed the Related Press at Pitino’s introductory information convention at MSG. “I feel he’d be the primary one to let you know he’s performed issues that he regrets. Who doesn’t once you get to be that age? I do know I’ve. I’m a believer in forgiveness and new beginnings as a priest, and I feel Rick’s going to do an amazing job for St. John’s.”
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For St. John’s, it was not solely a danger value taking, it was a sign that at a transformational time in school sports activities, when competing on the highest stage would require extra funding than ever, the varsity supposed to be within the recreation.
“It’s precisely the imaginative and prescient that I’ve had for this college for 20 years,” Repole stated. “School athletics has at all times been a enterprise. Now it’s as a lot of a enterprise as ever earlier than.”
Pitino sees gamers being paid for his or her identify, picture and likeness, with a brand new revenue-sharing construction on the horizon, as a bonus for St. John’s, a faculty with a big commuter-student inhabitants that may’t replicate the on-campus environments discovered at giant state universities in different energy conferences.
“They had been actually struggling to get expertise there,” Pitino stated. “The NIL has type of helped us that we are able to compete on an equal stage with our opponents.”
Repole funds greater than half of St. John’s NIL funds, but it surely’s not simply basketball success he’s after.
“I’m measuring my success with St John’s in two methods: Madison Sq. Backyard with 19,000 followers and St. John’s with file enrollment. If these two issues don’t occur, I failed,” he stated.
Athletic director Ed Kull, one other Queens native who labored for Repole at Vitaminwater within the early 2000s, turned Pitino’s “boss” in September after being employed away from Fordham.
Kull sees his job as maximizing the Pitino Impact on all fronts, together with a push for donations to St. John’s NIL collective that features a match of as much as $1 million by Repole for use for “switch portal and revenue-sharing alternatives forward.”
MILLION DOLLAR MATCH!!!
Contribute Right here:https://t.co/PMxfi8Gsj6#SJUBB #StJohns #NIL #FlatTopFund #CBB #BigEast #Johnnies #RedStorm pic.twitter.com/9ZFoGoZgmm
— Flat Prime Fund (@flattopfund) February 3, 2025
“I see it because the centerpiece, the place we acquired to assist fundraising, acquired to assist enrollment, acquired to assist our advertising profile, acquired to assist our engagement of alums, acquired to assist in the neighborhood,” Kull stated. “And that’s what Rick Pitino and basketball is doing at St John’s.”
The sport towards Windfall final Saturday was a couple of hundred tickets wanting being an official sellout at MSG. That may change on Tuesday evening, when St. John’s faces Marquette within the first top-15 matchup the Pink Storm has hosted since Jan. 30, 1999, when No. 1 UConn performed No. 9 St. John’s on the Backyard.
Repole needs to recreate a sense that goes even farther again.
“It’s going to take you again to 1985, man, and it’s a very particular factor,” Repole stated. “St. John’s job now could be to bottle that power, and produce it again to the college, academically, in admissions, with college students and new buildings, and all that. And you recognize what? I feel they may, and that’s what it’s about. Making St John’s not solely an amazing basketball crew, however presumably among the finest universities out right here.”
(Photograph: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Photographs)