CINCINNATI — Rick Pitino has compared St. John’s to a football team that runs the ball, plays terrific defense and hits a big pass once in a while.
The Johnnies are still waiting to hit more of the deep ball — in basketball vernacular, the 3-point shot.
But the Red Storm didn’t need it on Tuesday night at Cintas Center.
Their stifling defense and relentless rebounding was enough for an impressive 82-72 road victory over Xavier.
While the Johnnies’ 3-point shooting remains very much a work in progress — they were just 2-for-16 from distance in this win and have made only 11 3s in five league games — they hammered the Musketeers in every other area for their first Quad 1 win of the season and eighth victory in nine games.
“It’s normal to get discouraged when you don’t make shots. The last few games we’ve gotten over the hump where that doesn’t matter,” Pitino said. “What I’ve tried to convince them, in meeting upon meeting, is that missed shots don’t matter if you take good shots. Don’t get down. Tonight we never got down. We kept enhancing our work ethic.”
The aggression started early with Kadary Richmond and, aside from a brief shaky period to end the first half, didn’t stop.
It was a beatdown on the glass (50-30) and in the paint (54-30) as St. John’s improved to 4-1 in league play for the second straight season.
“The one thing you have to appreciate is we play so damn hard,” Pitino said. “We’re relentless on the glass, we play so hard defensively. We scrap, we move.”
RJ Luis and Zuby Ejiofor combined for 36 points and 22 rebounds, and Simeon Wilcher tallied 15.
Richmond followed with 12 points, six assists, four rebounds and three steals.
The player who best epitomized the relentless Red Storm (13-3, 4-1) was Aaron Scott.
He missed all three of his 3-point attempts, but that didn’t slow him down.
The senior forward still managed to score 12 points, add eight rebounds and four steals. He was also a team-high plus-16 in 33 minutes.
Defense, though, is where the Johnnies won this game.
They held Xavier, the Big East’s second-leading 3-point shooting team, to 22.2 percent shooting from 3-point range and 36.7 percent overall from the field.
The Musketeers entered the night 1-3 in Big East play, but that included two losses to No. 7 Marquette and No. 9 Connecticut by a combined seven points. St. John’s overwhelmed them with effort and physicality.
“They exposed us at a very high level,” Xavier coach Sean Miller said.
The start was strong, particularly from Richmond.
He scored the Johnnies’ first six points as they quickly built a big lead, as much as 14 at one point in that opening half.
CHECK OUT THE LATEST BIG EAST STANDINGS AND ST. JOHN’S STATS
The Musketeers helped, missing 14 of their first 17 shots.
But the Johnnies managed only 11 points over the final 7:13, and Xavier got to within four at the break.
The 3-pointers still weren’t falling, St. John’s making only one in 10 tries.
They were also hurt in transition, outscored 14-2 by Xavier (9-7, 1-4).
It felt somewhat similar to the loss to Creighton, when St. John’s blew most of an 11-point, first-half lead by halftime, and fell a point short.
But unlike against Creighton, St. John’s came out for the second half focused, determined and intense on defense.
Over the first 10 minutes of the period, the Johnnies held Xavier to as many made field goals as turnovers: Four.
They put together a 14-4 run that, capped by Scott’s putback on an offensive rebound, pushed the lead to a game-high 15 with 10:14 left.
It was academic from that point on.
“We didn’t do what we were supposed to do [against Creighton], so we just knew that coming out in this game, it was going to be important we put together a good second half,” Wilcher said. “We all know what’s at stake when you have a big lead in the beginning of a game. Sometimes you can let off the glass, but that’s not something we did tonight.”