4 Takeaways From UConn’s Historic Blowout vs. Rick Pitino’s St. John’s

PeoplesBank Arena (Hartford, Conn.) — Not for the first time, an unmistakable voice cut through the free-throw silence with a poignant message for St. John’s head coach Rick Pitino, leader of the No. 15 team in the nation. This time, Pitino’s backup center, Ruben Prey, had been dinged for a Flagrant 1 foul against No. 6 UConn point guard Silas Demary Jr., his reckless contest of an attempted dunk, hacksawing his opponent to the ground. And after the replay review, as Demary stepped to the foul line, the words from this particular Huskies fan pierced the air. “Hey Pitino,” the person wailed, “take your dirty f—— team home!” By then, Pitino had long since waved the white flag in a game that arrived with so much hype — that’s always the case when these two heavyweights do battle in the Big East’s modern era — and ended with a historic whimper. In pummeling and pounding the Red Storm to this degree, 72-40, the Huskies became the first program since Virginia on March 5, 2016, to limit a Pitino-coached team to fewer than 50 points, according to FOX Sports Research. St. John’s missed an unfathomable 24 consecutive shots to end the game, failing to connect on a field goal for the final 17:28 of an evening that devolved into a rout. UConn scored more points in the paint (42) than the Red Storm did in total. “That’s probably only happened to me two times in my career,” said Pitino, who spoke to the media for barely a minute outside the visiting locker room before cutting off further questions. “Once was my first year at Kentucky when we went into Phog Allen [Fieldhouse] at Kansas, I was playing with very much an inferior team [back then], not like this type of team. It’s all on me. I’m very disappointed in our performance.” Here are my takeaways from UConn’s dominant win against St. John’s: 1. Tarris Reed Jr. is the X-factor in UConn’s national championship pursuit When UConn head coach Dan Hurley met with the media for his pregame news conference, he repeatedly swatted aside the idea that a rematch between the Huskies and St. John’s could be distilled into a one-on-one matchup between Tarris Reed Jr. and Zuby Ejiofor, the starting centers for each teams. Hurley wouldn’t hear it. He assured those in attendance he only cared about winning the game, which would keep the Huskies afloat in a race for the Big East regular season title. But once the ball was tipped, once Reed and Ejiofor began their physical assault on each other in the low post, grabbing and shoving and wrestling for every inch of space on both ends of the floor, a certain synchronicity developed. It was as if both Hurley and Pitino were finally acknowledging that the team whose center could more legally bludgeon the other would almost certainly leave the arena with a win. The substitution patterns for both players mirrored each other across the opening half. And every entanglement beneath the basket was met with bated breath whenever a referee’s whistle blew in perhaps the most critical moment of UConn’s season, a rematch with first-place St. John’s that carried significant seeding implications for both the Big East Tournament and NCAA Tournament. With the Huskies’ win, the two teams are tied atop the conference standings. Reed marauded his way to 14 points, four rebounds and three assists in the opening half alone on Wednesday night to catalyze a Huskies’ offense that produced nearly as many points in the paint (22) as the Red Storm did in total at the break (26). There was a spinning layup against the undersized Dillon Mitchell. A transition dunk when he beat Ejiofor down the floor with ease. An emphatic block on guard Bryce Hopkins to ignite a fast break that ended with a traditional three-point play for point guard Malachi Smith. He backed down Ejiofor’s replacement, Ruben Prey, for a basket plus the foul. He rebounded his own miss and kicked the ball out for a 3-pointer by Solo Ball. All of that across a first half in which Ejiofor managed just a single point. By the time Reed checked out with 5:56 remaining — at which time he’d scored 20 points, snared 11 rebounds and tied a career high with six blocked shots — a rowdy crowd of more than 15,000 gave him a standing ovation, to which he responded with a series of fist pumps. When Reed reached the bench, assistant coach Luke Murray stopped his leading pupil and pointed a finger into his chest, effectively telling the Huskies’ star that so much about the night’s result was a result of his individual efforts. It was a sentiment Hurley echoed time and again in his post-game remarks. “If he wants to be a draft pick, if he wants to win championships, he’ll keep showing up like that,” Hurley said. “If he doesn’t, it hurts our chances, and then we’re letting each other down. We always needed Tarris to play like an All-American for this to work. And he certainly did today, and he did versus ‘Nova. I hate to put it all on one player, but I think when we get that Tarris — and again, that’s a repeatable thing. There’s nothing he did that was, like, lucky or hard shots. He just played with an identity tonight that was dominant.” 2. UConn’s defense is harkening back to early season form Late in the second half, with the outcome already secure, a flurry of air balls from the Red Storm verged on comedic. A spinning baseline floater from Hopkins landed several feet short of the rim. A floater from Prey on the next possession missed the rim wide left, at which point Pitino berated his big man for such an unsightly attempt. Guard Ian Jackson missed everything on an attempted 3-pointer that never had a chance. Then he whiffed again on a deep 2-pointer several possessions later. None of them even came close. Such a stretch of eyeball-burning futility reflected both the offensive implosion by St. John’s, which prompted Pitino to say his team “did things that we’ve never done.” And a reincarnated UConn defense is once again looking like a legitimate strength following an uncharacteristic lull for most of the month. Stunningly, the Red Storm only made two of 28 field goal attempts in the second half and failed to reach the 40-point mark until reserve guard Dylan Darling made a meaningless set of free throws with 1:29 remaining. “It was just our night, you know?” Hurley said. “It just starts snowballing on you when you have a night like this. Obviously, we played really good defense on them. I thought we demoralized them a little bit, you know, when the score gets to where the score got. I just think it was one of those nights where everything went great for us and everything went wrong for them.” In blocking nine shots, dogging the 3-point line and protecting the paint with waves of defenders, the Huskies turned in a performance reminiscent of the way they played early in the season, when advanced metrics suggested this group was among the best handful of teams in the country at that end of the floor. It rewrote and upended a pitiful four-game defensive slump earlier this month in which UConn lost twice and surrendered 108.7 points per 100 possessions, according to Torvik, a number so bad it ranked 175th nationally for that particular stretch. It’s also more than 15 points worse than the Huskies’ season average of 93.5 points per 100 possessions and close to double the microscopic mark of 69 points per 100 possessions against the Red Storm on Wednesday. “I think it’s taking pride,” UConn forward Alex Karaban said, “taking pride on the defensive end. Just individual matchups. Just really guarding our yard. And then just having trust in one another. “Trust that we’re going to help each other out. Trust that we’re going to be in the gaps. Trust that we’re going to help Tarris or Eric when they hedge a ball screen. Just having trust. I think we lost that trust for some moments, and we didn’t take as much pride during the moments that we didn’t play great defense. Now we’re getting back to that level that we’ve got to sustain the rest of the year.” 3. Huskies finally handle the full-court pressure When these two teams met at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 6, a rather comfortable St. John’s win in a raucous atmosphere, Pitino unleashed his trademark full-court press in a manner that largely dismantled UConn’s offensive rhythm. Ninety-plus feet of pressure from ball-hawking guards Oziyah Sellers and Dylan Darling drove the Huskies to commit 15 turnovers — nine of which were charged to Demary — and imbued the game with a physicality that UConn couldn’t match. Hurley even joked before Wednesday’s rematch that his team “missed the window” to do enough in the weight room to counter the Red Storm’s raw strength. Such struggles against the press also perpetuated a narrative that has gnawed at UConn the last two seasons. For the Huskies to respond the way they did on Wednesday night by only turning the ball over five times, one of which was an intentional shot clock violation in the waning seconds, felt like the mental conquering of a multi-year bugaboo. “We knew we had to get stops to avoid having to in-bound the ball against the pressure and just to try to play ahead of their defense,” Hurley said. “We’re doing a better job, I think, of getting out in transition because our defense is reinvigorated the last couple games.” By transforming one defensive stop after another into transition chances, the Huskies effectively mitigated one of Pitino’s most potent weapons for large chunks of the game. Each time UConn forced a missed shot, Hurley waved his players up the court wildly, imploring them to attack the rim at any and every opportunity before the Red Storm’s defense got set. A 14-0 edge in fast-break points reflected the Huskies’ commitment to attacking St. John’s at pace. Demary, the Georgia transfer who is now playing like one of the best point guards in the country, was the leader of it all. He responded from the nightmarish effort at Madison Square Garden with an excellent floor game that included seven points, eight rebounds, five assists and a steal, content to let the players around him handle most of the scoring. “Silas has got a lot of weapons,” Hurley said. “This team is about balance. Silas did the right thing today. He took five shots, he got on the glass, he took care of the ball, he found his teammates. He quarterbacked the team today.” 4. The Red Storm’s tournament résumé Few teams in college basketball, if any, have improved as much as Pitino’s since the start of the season — a blowout loss to UConn notwithstanding. There was a point in early January when St. John’s lost at home to lowly Providence and fell to just 8-5 overall, with prior defeats against every high-profile non-conference team. For Pitino to respond by reeling off 13 consecutive victories entering Wednesday’s game was merely the latest reminder of his incredible coaching prowess. St. John’s is still in the thick of this year’s race for the Big East regular season title. But how and where the Red Storm will be seeded in the NCAA Tournament is quite a bit trickier to project, because even Pitino’s lengthy win streak can’t undo his team’s unsavory start. Losses to then-No. 15 Alabama, then-No. 15 Iowa State, then-No. 21 Auburn and then-unranked Kentucky have left St. John’s with a fairly hollow résumé as selection Sunday approaches. In fact, the Red Storm’s only marquee victory was their win over then-No. 3 UConn earlier this month. And even that result is clouded, to some degree, by the demolition that unfolded here in the rematch. Barring another victory over UConn in the Big East Tournament — assuming the league’s two best teams are likely to face each other in the championship game — Pitino’s group will enter Selection Sunday having only beaten one ranked foe. That’s not a lot for the selection committee to ponder. “We’re still playing for a league championship,” Pitino said. “It doesn’t matter whether you lose by one or 40. The league championship is still at stake. Obviously, we have to make our corrections and move on.” 4½. What’s next? St. John’s now embarks on what could be a tricky finishing stretch that includes one more game than the Huskies. A highly winnable home contest against Georgetown next week is sandwiched by two difficult matchups with Villanova (home) and Seton Hall (away) before the conference tournament at Madison Square Garden. Now tied for first place in the Big East, any slip-up by the Red Storm could squander the chance to become the first team to win consecutive, outright Big East regular season titles since Villanova in 2015-16 and 2016-17 under former coach Jay Wright. The Huskies should now have an injection of motivation to finish their remaining games in style with a path toward a potential No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament squarely in play. A home date with Seton Hall this weekend will give way to the road finale at Marquette on March 7. “I think our ceiling has always been winning multiple games and winning big-time games and pushing for a Big East Tournament and even a national championship,” Demary said. “We just kind of went through a stretch of letting things slide, and [now] we kind of locked back in [on] doing the things we need to do.”