St. John's gets helpful advice from stat guru Jason Fortin
Jason Fortin, a statistical guru for the St. John's men's basketball team, looks on in the first half of a Big East men’s basketball game at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 28, 2026. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
St. John’s will be seeking its 12th straight win when it takes the floor at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee for Wednesday night’s Big East game against Marquette. But it will be facing a very different team than the one it trounced by 24 points on Jan. 13 at the Garden.
Just as the No. 17 Red Storm (20-5, 13-1) have been evolving over the month that has passed, so have the Golden Eagles (9-17, 4-11).
It may not show in Marquette’s 3-5 record over the eight games since, but its offense is vastly improved. When they last met, the Eagles averaged 1.03 points per possession and ranked 192nd in the country in the category; in the eight games since they’ve ranked 44th with an average of 1.14 points. And none of them has been better than Royce Parham, who is making 71% of his 6.4 two-point shots and 37% on 3.4 threes.
Storm coach Rick Pitino and his staff are keenly aware of this and the reason is Jason Fortin, a statistical guru who has been on the St. John’s bench and advising the coaching staff since Pitino was hired before the 2023-24 season.
Fortin, who rooted for St. John’s, delivered Newsday as a kid growing up in Selden and has an enduring love for the Knicks, spent years in a successful career in finance as an analyst and building statistical models. He began applying it to his love of golf and soon realized that all the principles were applicable to basketball. He created his own mathematical formula to measure player performance, though he is also expert in tracking trends.
Today he is thrilled every day to be contributing to the Red Storm’s return to national prominence by using his skills to give St. John’s an edge. He attends every Storm practice and game. If one looks for him in the row behind the players, he is the guy with glasses and the salt-and-pepper beard constantly working his iPad to track what’s transpiring in the game.
“He’s a big contributor to our program — not small — big,” Pitino told Newsday.
“I have as much analytical knowledge as any coach could possibly have thanks to him and I use just about 90% of it.
“In this day and age, you’d better be ahead of the curve from an analytical standpoint,” Pitino added. “You’d better know all you can about a player’s tendencies, that a certain player is going left 78% of the time. Or that he’s going right and, when he goes right, he pulls up 90% of the time instead of going all the way [to the basket]. You’d better know all that information.”
Pitino said that Fortin sends him three to five emails daily about statistical things he has tracked about the Storm and their upcoming opponents. He also tracks the metrics the NCAA Tournament selection committee lean into when they select and seed the 68-team field.
“It’s amazing to be right there watching coach Pitino and feeling a part of it,” Fortin said. “While I feel like I am a net positive for the team . . . it’s a tiny blip in terms of the impact compared to what coach Pitino, the players and the assistant coaches have. They are amazing in the amount of work they do and the detail that they go into. I just give them the view of the numbers from 30,000 feet that they can use as they see fit.”
St. John’s assistant coach Taliek Brown marvels at how comprehensive Fortin’s analyses are and has dubbed him “A.I.”
Fortin wanted to play basketball at Newfield High but dropped the pursuit “when I realized I was the fourth-string point guard on the ninth-grade team,” he said. He ended up playing singles for the school’s varsity tennis team.
He became an avid golfer later in life and it turned out that he and Pitino had a golfing friend in common that put them together. Fortin plays at Westchester Country Club. Pitino plays at Winged Foot. Dennis McCauley is a member at both and insisted the two meet.
“He told me ‘I’ve got this computer geek who’s retired from Wall Street, who does all these stats . . . and he thinks he can help you,’” Pitino said. “I let it go in one ear and out the other [but] he kept pressing me on it.”
Fortin got to do an elevator pitch over a 20-minute meeting at the bar at Winged Foot and the crux of it was explaining how Knick scoring great Carmelo Anthony was a statistical drag on the team and a reason his teams didn’t win many playoff series.
Pitino’s interest was piqued. He said he had no money to offer and Fortin replied he didn’t want any — just wanted to see if he could help. They agreed that he would spend a week with the team and he’s been with the Storm ever since, gradually becoming a part of how St. John’s readies for opponents.
“I do this for free, but there’s an incredible payoff for me,” Fortin said. “I hear the greatest coach of all time. I’ve got a front-row seat to him at practice. I’ve got a seat behind the bench at games. And I get to hear what he says.
“He’s not only an amazing tactician, he’s a master motivator . . . Watching that is as thrilling as it gets.”
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.
