St. John's makes it close but loses to Villanova
Julian Champagnie of the St. John's Red Storm drives to the hoop in the first half against Jermaine Samuels of the Villanova Wildcats at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
For 35 minutes – really even longer than that – nearly everything that could go wrong for St. John’s did on Tuesday night. Then over a frenzied final four minutes, the Red Storm nearly pulled off the equivalent of a Hail Mary against 15th-ranked Villanova at the Garden.
The stage was set for St. John’s to have a long night when Posh Alexander arrived with his right ankle in a walking boot because of the sprain he sustained late in Saturday’s win at Butler that kept him from finishing the game. Then, in the course of the first half, leading scorer Julian Champagnie dislocated his finger and needed to pop it back in and later was fouled and fell hard on his right hip, an injury that hampered him the rest of the game.
The Storm answered the call with 35 minutes where only Aaron Wheeler stood out while the rest of them shot horrifically and trailed by 20 points with 4:27 to play. And that’s when it happened – with both Alexander and Champagnie out of the game. St. John’s took advantage of eight Wildcats turnovers in the final stretch and had a chance to tie it when Tareq Coburn rose up from the right wing for a three-pointer with 13 seconds to play.
It didn’t fall and Villanova ended up eking out a 75-69 Big East victory before 9,712.
Asked about how the final minutes unfolded, Villanova coach Jay Wright replied "it’s just amazing to me what happens at the end of games. You can play that well and the game can go a certain way for that long and all of a sudden everything changes. I don’t have an answer for what happened."
"We ran out of time," St. John’s coach Mike Anderson said.
"I was proud of the guys on the floor (at the end) playing with fire in their bellies and we’ve got to do that for 40 minutes," he added. "We got a good shot (from Coburn) but we had a huge deficit to overcome."
Alexander wasn’t the only question mark for the contest. Villanova’s two leading scorers, Collin Gillespie and Justin Moore, were both doubtful with injuries but ended up in the starting lineup. Moore finished with 16 points and though Gillespie didn’t score for the first time since the 2017-18 season, he had 10 rebounds.
Wheeler has been emerging as a real threat for the Storm (13-10, 5-7) since the calendar turned to 2022, but against Villanova (18-6, 11-3), he took a quantum leap. The 6-9 forward had a career-high 31 points on 11-for-17 shooting with six three-pointers. The sixth came with 35 seconds left in the game and cut a margin that had been 66-46 to 72-69.
"I’ve started playing more confidently," said Wheeler, who is averaging 14.7 points on 52% shooting over his last 11 games. "My teammates did a good job of finding me."
Champagnie finished with 12 points on 4-for-15 shooting. The other Storm players were an aggregate 9-for-43 with Montez Mathis a horrific 1-for-14 as they made 32% on the night.
Eric Dixon had 16 points and Brandon Slater had 15 points for the Wildcats.
St. John’s will have another shot at a first signature win on Sunday against No. 24 Connecticut. Anderson sidestepped a question about the severity of Alexander’s ankle sprain by calling it "day-to-day" but did say an X-ray was negative.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
