St. John's defeats Wagner, improves to 5-1

Back home after a 12,860-mile haul to win a tournament in Alaska, St. John's settled right into the local atmospherics last night. Note that the team nickname is the Storm in considering its 69-61 non-conference men's basketball victory over Wagner College.

The game at times had the feeling of maneuvering through the floods and felled trees outside of Carnesecca Arena. While Wagner was enduring its own particular pestilence - 21 turnovers - St. John's occasional lost-in-the-wilderness shooting - 36.1 percent from the field - allowed Wagner to find its way back into the game, three times pulling within four points in the last six minutes.

What ultimately saved the Marco Polo of college basketball was a combination of its frantic defensive effort (15 steals, pulled off by seven different players) and the whistle-blowers assuring that Wagner didn't get away with anything untoward. The refs sent St. John's to the free- throw line 36 times, so that making 22 of them (only 61.1 percent) was enough.

By journey's end, two seniors extracted from the starting lineup by coach Steve Lavin led the St. John's scorers - D.J. Kennedy with 20 points and Justin Brownlee with 17. The four-guard starting five originally was said to be a tactic to add speed, but Lavin said after the game there were three reasons for sitting Kennedy, Brownless and Dwayne Polee, who had been combining for 31.6 points per game, through the early minutes.

"It was a combination of rewarding kids that really had been playing well," Lavin said of starting Paris Horne, Malik Stith and Justin Burrell, "of putting a fire on the fanny [of others] and holding kids accountable to the academic side here." He indicated that some had not been attending class.

Lavin lamented his team's "wasted 14 potential points from the charity stripe and 3-for-17 on three-pointers; our execution has to be more crisp. Foul trouble hurt us in terms of rotation, but the good news is we found a way to win. That's a positive and we'll take it."

St. John's (5-1) hounded Wagner repeatedly into mistakes and made two spectacular defensive stops at the end of the half. Paris Horne's flying block on John Thompson's layup was quickly followed by Brownlee's rejection of Chris Martin's three-point attempt.

That roused the crowd of 4,008 and St. John's virtually sailed through the early minutes of the second half, stretching its lead to 16 points at 46-30 when Brownlee scored four field goals in a two-minute span.

Wagner (3-2) persevered as best it could, coached by former Seton Hall star Dan Hurley and working with an enrollment one-tenth of St. John's. At least it didn't have to travel halfway around the world for this one.