Saturday night was always going to be big.
Wednesday’s ugly loss at Connecticut, which snapped a 13-game winning streak, just added to the significance of Villanova’s visit to Madison Square Garden in prime time.
The 15th-ranked Johnnies’ Big East regular-season title hopes will be on the line against Kevin Willard’s third-place, tournament-bound Wildcats.
“I feel this is the most important game of the three-year span I’ve been here,” St. John’s coach Rick Pitino said Friday. “Because of what happened last game, because of the meaning of being in first place, how good [Villanova is], this time of year, to get back on the winning side. There are about seven variables that are crucial for this game.”
St. John’s and Connecticut are tied in the loss column atop the Big East, and the Red Storm hold the tiebreaker. That’s somewhat secondary for now. The entire focus is on Villanova and bouncing back from that gruesome 32-point loss in Hartford, Conn., in which St. John’s missed its final 24 shots from the field and managed only 40 points.
It was the fewest a Pitino-coached team has ever produced.
The lowlights have been everywhere on social media.
“Obviously, we know that people want to see how we respond to this, if we’re able to respond to this or if we crumble,” Oziyah Sellers said. “I feel like none of us have that personality, and I feel like we’ll be able to bounce back in the right way.”
Pitino didn’t even watch the film of the setback, believing it was such an anomaly and not something he wanted to relive. The players did go over cut-ups with assistant coaches. Pitino felt that as St. John’s continued to miss shots, there was a snowball effect that extended to the defensive end.
Their frontcourt, so good throughout the conference season, was beaten up badly by the Huskies and outscored in the paint, 42-12.
“If you lose by one or two or you lose by 30, it’s the same thing. It’s a loss,” Pitino said. “And sometimes, an embarrassing loss can help even more than losing by two.”
The positive for St. John’s (22-6, 15-2) is that it has been here before. After a shaky nonconference showing and dismal home loss to Providence on Jan. 3, they were 9-5. The NCAA Tournament was far from a given.
They responded by reeling off 13 straight wins to flip the narrative on their season, winning their first eight true road games.
“I know that we’ll be fine going forward,” Sellers said.
Added Dillon Mitchell: “We have a lot of older, experienced guys who have been in different situations throughout their college careers, where adversity hits. The main thing is we’re all in the right space mentally, and making sure we stay together. At the end of the day, it’s just one loss. Like I keep saying, our goals are right there in front of us.”
Since the blowout, Pitino shared his own embarrassing losses and how his teams came back from those defeats. In 2009, Louisville followed up a 33-point setback to Notre Dame with 13 consecutive wins, a Big East Tournament title and an Elite Eight berth. In 2012, the Cardinals lost by 31 to Providence, yet won seven of their next eight and reached the Final Four.
The message was simple: One game won’t define the Johnnies, as long as they regroup. Pitino doesn’t believe his players’ confidence was shattered by the Huskies, as poorly as they performed.
Saturday is a chance to move past it.
“They know how important this game is,” Pitino said. “I think they want to prove that it was just a terrible night.”
