No. 4 Pitt next on St. John's Garden list

If the buzz is back this season for St. John's basketball, it's because first-year coach Steve Lavin has the Red Storm performing brilliantly on the Madison Square Garden stage.

In recent years, it felt like the World's Emptiest Arena when St. John's took the court, but Lavin's team has ticked off MSG wins against Davidson, then-undefeated Northwestern, No. 13 Georgetown, No. 11 Notre Dame, No. 3 Duke and No. 9 Connecticut.

Only then-No. 4 Syracuse has beaten St. John's at the Garden this season.

So does the Red Storm (16-9, 8-5 Big East) have enough MSG magic left to upset No. 4 Pitt (24-2, 12-2) Saturday afternoon?

"You say 'upsets,' we say 'regular wins,' " St. John's forward Sean Evans said Friday. "I mean, that's our goal . . . There were a lot of teams coming into this year that we haven't beaten since we've been here. Every time we get that win, we check them off.

"Hopefully, after Pittsburgh, we'll come into the locker room and put their name next to a box and put a check in it."

Evans was referring to a set of stairs Lavin draws on the whiteboard before every game to chart his team's progress step by step as it climbs in the Big East standings, striving to earn an NCAA Tournament berth. For the group of nine seniors Lavin inherited, that has meant achieving their first-ever wins against the likes of Duke and Marquette (on the road).

They're 0-4 in four seasons against Pitt, and no one is more troubled by that record than D.J. Kennedy, a Pittsburgh native.

"I've been here for four years and haven't been able to beat them," Kennedy said. "So it definitely would be great to me to beat a team I grew up rooting for."

It's not going to be as easy as the Red Storm made it look against Duke and UConn. Pitt leading scorer Ashton Gibbs, who missed the past three games with a partially torn left medial collateral ligament, is expected to return. He's the best three-point shooter in the Big East, and if the Red Storm has shown one defensive weakness, it's a league-worst 36.3 percent three-point shooting defense.

"It creates a pick-your-poison scenario," Lavin said of Pitt's outside shooting. "If you stretch [the defense] to the three-point line, they pound away with their rugged front line. If you help too much to the post, they're bombing threes on you.

"They don't get rattled. They play at a very deliberate pace, and they impose their style of play on opponents as effectively as anyone in the country. But we like our team, and we're in the Garden, and we present some challenges as well. That's why you tip it up."