So it turns out St. John’s fans can’t even take solace in cursing the fickle finger of fate — although they may wish to make use of another finger in order to send a message to the NCAA Tournament selection committee.
Turns out St. John’s wasn’t even all that close to the bubble, weren’t even the Big East team that went to bed Sunday night realizing that the spate of upsets that littered the sport the past few days knocked them out of the brackets — Seton Hall was. Turns out the 2-8 stretch that sent the season spinning sideways in January and February mattered more than the six-game winning streak that tried to salvage it.
“I think it makes it easier that we weren’t one of the first four out,” Rick Pitino insisted.
Thing is, Pitino has spent much of his adult life coaching important games inside the NCAA Tournament, and logic says he’ll do so again. His immediate concern was for the departing seniors — specifically Jordan Dingle, Joel Soriano and Chris Ledlum, whose careers spanned 13 seasons and four schools and never landed in the NCAA Tournament, and Daniss Jenkins, who got there with Pitino at Iona last year and desperately wanted to drag St. John’s back there.
“The disappointment in my players’ eyes,” Pitino said. “That was hard.”
There is disappointment all across that loose confederacy of New York basketball that focuses its energy and its attention on St. John’s, that believed these Johnnies were going to be the team to get them back to the dance after five years, maybe get them a win in the tournament for the first time in 24.
This is the flip side of Selection Sunday. CBS sends out camera crews to a couple of dozen campuses, but they don’t ever go anywhere close to the places that are sitting ominously close to the bubble. And as one upset after another splattered the landscape over the weekend, bid-stealers everywhere — even within Pitino’s own family, when son Richard’s New Mexico Lobos won the Mountain West — St. John’s opted for a zoom call.
Maybe they didn’t know.
But Pitino’s been at this a long time. Maybe he didn’t know. But he knew.
“I thought when Colorado got beat [in the Pac-12 finals] and Carolina got beat [in the ACC] and FAU got beat [in the American],” Pitino said, “we were going to have a very difficult time making it.”
It’s amazing how quickly the narrative can change in the sport. Thursday, the Johnnies beat up Seton Hall and even the most hard-grading of the sport’s bracketologists deemed them in. Friday they represented themselves even better, pushing UConn to the end of a 95-90 loss. If anything, that seemed to brandish their credentials.
Then the funny stuff happened. Within a few hours, an N.C. State guard named Michael O’Connell knocked down a buzzer-beating prayer that kept the Wolfpack’s miracle run in the ACC alive. It turns out that the Johnnies might not even have been directly affected by that given how far out of the field they wound up, but it was still a stern reminder of how crazy March is.
And even if Pitino is too seasoned and too salty to need the lesson, it’s still a helpful reminder: Win enough games in January and February, you buttress yourself from the frustrations and the whims of March. Don’t lose to what became an 8-24 team in November (Michigan) then you don’t give the committee ammo to use against you. Don’t sink to 14-12 in February, you don’t make those folks wonder about your conference.
(And, for the record: three Big East teams in the Field of 68 is nonsense. Danny Hurley is right. It’s damned disrespectful.)
“Bitterness doesn’t help,” Pitino said. “I’ve had enough bitterness to last a lifetime.”
Instead, he will do what he’s always done as his default position: He’ll get back to work. The Johnnies rightly declined the NIT because transfer portal opens Monday, and the staff needs to fill seven spots. They have to get after it all over again. The Tournament will go on, as it so often has the last quarter century, without St. John’s. Could they have done damage given the chance?
Maybe. Maybe not. All we know for sure is they’ll never get the chance.