Anatomy of St. John's 10-game win streak: Turnovers down, rebounds up

Rick Pitino was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on his postgame news conference Monday following 17th-ranked St. John’s 87-82 overtime victory over Xavier when he concluded his final answer with a big-picture statement.

“We are 19-5,” he said. “So it’s a great record and we are proud of it.”

It was quite a contrast to the words he uttered after the Red Storm’s loss to Providence on Jan. 3 at the Garden to fall to 9-5 when he described their situation as “backs to the wall.”

“When I say backs to the wall, it’s because our record’s not good,” he elaborated.

Things do indeed look a lot different five weeks later. St. John’s used that low point to launch its current 10-game winning streak. It hasn’t lost a Big East road game and it now has a signature win, Friday’s triumph over then-No. 3 Connecticut.

There may be no one thing — or performance of one player — that explains how the Storm changed the arc of its season. But an examination of the numbers show some significant trends when one compares what they’ve done in the past 10 games with what they’d done in the 10 previous games.

St. John’s has become a much better defensive team. And the defense has created extra opportunities that it has cashed in on. In the 10 games ending with the Providence loss, St. John’s averaged 59.1 shots, while its opponents averaged 62.7; it’s hard to win with fewer scoring opportunities, which might explain why the Red Storm were 6-4 in those games.

In the 10-game winning streak, St. John’s is averaging 62.5 shots but has reduced the number of scoring opportunities for its foes. It’s allowing only 55.6 shots in the streak.

It also doesn’t hurt that St. John’s is shooting 47.2% over the past 10 games compared with making 43.1% in the prior 10. But it’s worth drilling down why the Red Storm were taking nearly four fewer shots than their opponents in the 10 games leading up to the streak and about seven more than foes during it.

The numbers suggest most of the difference lies in playing better defense.

Typically a team has a scoring opportunity on every possession, and more than one if it gets an offensive rebound. Force a turnover and you’ve taken one away. Get a defensive rebound and you’ve robbed your opponent of another. These are the places where St. John’s is thriving during the winning streak.

During the 10 games leading up to the winning streak, St. John’s forced exactly as many turnovers as it committed and gained nothing there. When its defense produced a missed shot, opponents got the rebound 38% of the time and thus an extra scoring chance.

Now look at the winning streak.

St. John’s is forcing 13.3 turnovers per game and has cut its number of turnovers from 12.8 per game to 8.6. The plus-4.7 turnover margin means nearly five more possessions for the Storm in every contest.

When the St. John’s defense gets an opponent to miss a shot, they are no longer getting just 62% of those rebounds. In the streak they’ve gotten 74% — further reducing the number of chances for the opposition to score.

It’s a team game and everything is built on team concepts, but if one wanted to drill down on a pair of players who have helped change these trends, Dillon Mitchell and Bryce Hopkins would be prime examples. And it’s not as simple as scoring and rebounding averages.

Mitchell averaged 22 minutes — all off the bench — in the 10 games leading up to the winning streak. During the streak he’s played 33 minutes per game and, yes, he is averaging 9.0 rebounds in this stretch compared to 5.6 in the previous one. He’s not the only player rebounding more, just the biggest example.

“We’ve improved in [rebounding], especially with Dillon Mitchell coming into the starting lineup . . . with his physicality and length,” Zuby Ejiofor said last week. “That’s something that we definitely needed to work on and we’re doing a better job at.”

Hopkins has cut his number of turnovers drastically, has become more assertive and gotten to the free-throw line more. During the 10 games prior to the streak, Hopkins was committing 2.1 turnovers per game. In the streak that number is just 0.4. His improvement in this area alone has cut an average of about two scoring chances for opponents.

He was getting to the free- throw line less than two times per game when the team went 6-4. He is there over three times per game as it’s gone 10-0.

So when one asks “how is St. John’s doing it?” understand that there is much in play, but getting more scoring opportunities has been essential. The Red Storm made sure they were home to open the door when opportunity knocked.

By Roger Rubin

roger.rubin@newsday.com@rogrubin

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.