CHARLESTON, S.C. — Twenty-six good minutes wasn’t enough. Not even close.
It may have been an improvement on the prior performances up to this point, but St. John’s wasn’t going to beat Atlantic 10 favorite Dayton without playing a complete game.
After a fast start to the second half, St. John’s appeared to run out of gas as Dayton hit a gear it couldn’t reach.
The Flyers were the far better team when it mattered, and advanced to the Charleston Classic final with an 88-81 victory at TD Arena.
“I wasn’t overly disappointed with Michigan, but I’m overly disappointed tonight, because we’re losing because we can’t pay attention to a scouting report,” coach Rick Pitino fumed. “We’ve got guys who just care about offense and they don’t know how to defend. Not in terms of effort — the effort is fine — in terms of paying attention to the scouting, how things are played.”
St. John’s (2-2) will meet Utah in the third-place game at 5:30 p.m. Sunday.
Dayton (3-1) took control with a 19-5 run fueled by dynamic big man DaRon Holmes II and never looked back. St. John’s was outscored by 12 over the final 13:25 minutes, out-worked, out-hustled and out-played across the board.
The offense grew stagnant, committing nine second half turnovers.
The defense was a sieve, allowing Dayton to shoot a blistering 52 percent from the field and 41.2 percent from 3-point range.
“You’re not going to win that way,” Pitino said.
Joel Soriano was by far the best Johnnie again, notching 21 points and nine rebounds. He didn’t have much help.
Daniss Jenkins, Chris Ledlum and Jordan Dingle combined to score 35 points on 12-for-33 shooting, a concerning trend for the newcomers.
Soriano, though, was one of the defensive culprits, struggling against the quicker and more athletic Holmes in the pick-and-roll. The big man scored 14 of his 21 points after the break.
“I’m concerned about defense. We’re losing games because we can’t absorb scouting,” Pitino said. “Joel tonight was all part of the equation. He let that kid have a great night because he didn’t play [the pick and roll] correctly.”
After this performance, St. John’s defense is ranked 111th nationally in efficiency.
It is allowing 75.7 points per game and two of the last three opponents have shot over 51 percent from the floor.
What made this frustrating was that the Johnnies did a lot of good things over the first 26 minutes.
They were forcing turnovers, limiting Holmes and led by as many as six early in the second half.
Then, the mistakes came in a game in which St. John’s offense was performing well.
To Jenkins, that was part of the problem.
“I think it’s just a lack of focus,” the senior said. “You see it one game, the next game you don’t see it. … North Texas, we knew the game plan, knew we had to [win with] defense. This one it was kind of like, all right we had success on offense, so you can easily forget about defense. You can get overwhelmed with offense, you can get excited and then you lose focus on what actually is getting us those easy shots and easy things on offense.”
Throughout the preseason, Pitino expressed concern about the defensive end of the floor with a brand new team full of players who had never won before at the college level because their respective teams didn’t defend well enough.
Thursday’s win over North Texas was a step in the right direction, and for a while on Friday, St. John’s seemed headed to a quality win.
But then the defensive problem popped up again.
“They backed off, they got lazy, they didn’t play the pick and roll correctly,” Pitino said. “Look, it’s going to just take time with these guys. They’ve never guarded in their lives with the exception of [Nahiem] Alleyne. They’ve never guarded. So they have to learn to play that way or they’re going to keep losing. It’s all about defense.”
