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There was a celebration on the Madison Square Garden floor when the clock hit triple zeroes and St. John’s had escaped with a victory Saturday afternoon.
Inside the Johnnies locker room, though, Rick Pitino took the glass half-empty approach.
“They think I’m going to jump up and down, say, ‘What a great win.’ It’s just the opposite,” he said after Kadary Richmond’s jumper with three seconds left sent 15th-ranked St. John’s to a heart-stopping 68-66 win over Providence. “You lose games when you don’t pay attention to your job, and they didn’t pay attention to their jobs. We’re very fortunate and very pleased we won, but very disappointed with the way we played down the stretch — not offensively, but defensively.”
Pitino spent most of his postgame news conference critical of the performance. The Red Storm (19-3, 10-1) held a 19-point lead with 8:32 left and coughed it up. Their fourth-ranked defense fell apart, undone by Providence’s incredible 3-point shooting. The Friars hit six 3-point shots over the final 6:28, and were 12-for-28 from distance for the game.
Even after Richmond’s shot, Pitino didn’t like the final possession defensively. Had Providence swung the ball, it could’ve had an open shot, rather than Bensley Joseph’s half-court prayer that didn’t come close.
“I don’t mean to be overly disappointed. It’s just little things that irk the hell out of me,” he said. “Like the last play, not picking up a guy running down the left sideline after we make a bucket, not running the right spacing on an offensive play, defensively [not backing] up below the pro 3-point line. Those things you can control. You can’t control a missed free throw, you can’t control a missed shot. But you can control those things, and we didn’t control that, and that’s the disappointing thing for me.”
Pitino felt his players started worrying too much about missed shots and free throws, and it carried over to lackadaisical defense.
They gave a quality 3-point shooting team open looks, and nearly paid for it with a loss.
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It was out of character for this group. The Johnnies have frequently won this season with defense, even on days when they shot worse than they did on Saturday.
But, as they have all year, the Red Storm found a way to win.
“It’s always better to learn from winning than learn from losing. So we learned a valuable lesson,” Pitino said. “This helps you. If I go in there and smile, be happy, we’re going to take an ‘L’ somewhere because we didn’t do our job listening defensively. When you don’t do your job defensively, you lose. We have to clean that up and we’ll learn our lesson with a win.”
