St. John's Rick Pitino on grinding out victory over Ole Miss: 'We were nervous'
St. John's coach Rick Pitino reacts in the first half of an NCAA men’s basketball game against the Ole Miss Rebels at Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
This was no piece of artistry. For St. John's, there really wasn’t anything attractive about it except for the final score. The No. 23 Red Storm badly needed a win on Saturday night, and though they didn’t play well, they did play hard enough to get it.
As poorly as the Red Storm performed in terms of shooting and taking care of the ball, they made sure Mississippi played worse, eking out a 63-58 non-conference victory before a raucous crowd of 14,799 at the Garden.
"They didn't have it tonight offensively, but they could realize [they could] play [their] poorest offensive game but still win," St. John's coach Rick Pitino said. "That was the greatest lesson to take away."
"I thought we could win the game if it was 65-64," Ole Miss coach Chris Beard said. "We said it's a team averaging over 90 points a game . . . and played the pace that we needed to to be successful. Just offensively, we couldn't manufacture enough. And I would give all that credit to St. John's defense. That's the best defense we played against this year."
St. John’s (5-3) was a prohibitive favorite against the Rebels but found itself protecting a four-point lead in the final minute and managed to survive. Dylan Darling made three of four free throws, Zuby Ejiofor went 2-for-2 from the stripe and Joson Sanon made one of two to keep the Red Storm ahead.
Ejiofor, who finished with nine rebounds and eight blocked shots, had 13 of his 15 points in the second half and Darling had all of his seven points in the last four minutes — including five in the final 1:09 — to lead St. John’s on a night when it shot 34% from the floor, missed 10 free throws and committed 20 turnovers.
"[I'm] happy I could make those free throws down the stretch to help seal it, [although] I missed one," said Darling, who shot 1-for-5 from the field, "but man, I would like to make any other shot besides a free throw. I feel like that would help the team out a lot. It's something I'm working on and hopefully it will click."
"Dylan Darling [says] he can't throw the ball in the ocean — they all think that [way]," Pitino said. "See, I thought he won the game by breaking the pressure at the end of the game. When everybody was nervous, he wasn't."
Ole Miss (5-4), which suffered its fourth straight loss, shot 36%, committed 20 turnovers and went 2-for-16 from three-point range. The Red Storm turned the Rebels' giveaways into 20 points.
“We played hard enough to be successful tonight. We didn’t play well enough,” Beard said. “Why? We’re playing against the best coach in the history of basketball, in my opinion.”
Bryce Hopkins had eight points and Sanon, Oziyah Sellers, Dillon Mitchell and Ian Jackson added seven points each for St. John’s.
"This is not how we really wanted to start off, but it's a work in progress," Ejiofor said. "We're not going to look too far ahead. We're not going to think about the past losses or anything like that. All we could control is the now and moving forward. We have pretty high expectations, every single one of us, but we're just going to stay steady-minded."
Malik Dia led Ole Miss with 18 points, but the Rebel most of the Garden fans had their eyes on was AJ Storr. Storr played the 2022-23 season as a freshman with St. John’s and left after Pitino was hired, even though he was one of the few offered a chance to return when the Hall of Fame coach essentially cleaned house. Storr drew boos when he was introduced and every time he touched the ball and heard cheers when he missed free throws. He finished with two points, shot 0-for-6 and committed three turnovers.
The Red Storm looked as if they might pull away at several points in the first half by taking advantage of the Rebels' sloppy play, but St. John’s didn’t make its open looks and shot only 33.3%. It led by as much as 15 before halftime, but Ole Miss closed with seven unanswered points to cut the margin to 33-25 at the break.
St. John’s entered the game off last week’s loss to No. 20 Auburn, its third loss in three contests against nationally ranked opponents. So even though Ole Miss is unranked, it felt like as much of a must-win for the Red Storm as they might encounter at this time of year.
And they greeted it that way. The defense and the rebounding — two areas in which they came up short in those big-opportunity losses — were obvious priorities, and they worked hard at both.
"We were nervous tonight, and I sense that they were nervous because there was such high expectations and they wanted to win so badly that they were all tight," Pitino said. "As much as there were so many mistakes at the end of the game, we made them take bad shots at the end of the game. Our defense was there."
St. John’s forced 13 turnovers in the first half — some off its press and some off the brutally sloppy play of the Rebels — and turned them into 16 points. The Red Storm also had eight offensive rebounds that they turned into nine points.
Ejiofor was especially tenacious on defense with six blocked shots — his career high — and three steals in the first 20 minutes.
Sanon scored six points in a 13-4 run that gave St. John's a 17-11 lead and Jackson then had five points in a 12-1 run. His three-pointer with 4:42 left before the break made it 31-16.
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.
