St. John's has multiple contenders for postseason awards
St. John's Red Storm head coach Rick Pitino gestures in at the first half of a Big East men’s basketball game against the Connecticut Huskies at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The Big East conducted a preseason poll of coaches in October and clearly didn’t hit the mark. St. John’s was predicted to finish fifth, yet on Wednesday night, the seventh-ranked Red Storm were playing at Butler for a share of the regular-season conference title for the first time since 1992.
The annual awards will be given out in a little more than two weeks, right before the start of the Big East Tournament. And St. John’s — in an exceptional and resurgent season — could have multiple winners.
Front and center has to be head coach Rick Pitino as a candidate for Coach of the Year. Pitino has coached in the Big East for 12 seasons — two years with Providence, eight with Louisville and now two with the Red Storm. Though he has taken three conference teams to a Final Four and won a national championship with the 2013 Cardinals, he has never been selected as Coach of the Year.
But there also is the matter of Player of the Year and, as UConn coach Dan Hurley explained after Sunday’s loss to the Storm at the Garden, things could get complicated.
Among the St. John’s players, Kadary Richmond was tabbed as a first-teamer in the preseason poll and Deivon Smith a second-teamer. But maybe the Red Storm can produce a conference Player of the Year for the first time since Walter Berry in 1986.
The question is, who would that be? RJ Luis Jr. has been the team’s top player from start to finish. He is averaging 17.4 points, 7.1 rebounds and 2.3 assists.
“RJ’s having a great season,” Pitino said. “He’s having, I think, a Player of the Year season. And he is fascinating. The thing about RJ: He’s not close to his potential,”
In the past 10 games since the Storm began its ascent in the polls, Richmond has been exceptional. Over that span, he is averaging 16.9 points, seven rebounds, 5.6 assists and 2.3 steals.
And then there is junior center Zuby Ejiofor, who is averaging 14 points and 8.1 rebounds and ranks second in the nation in offensive rebounds per game.
Asked about how he’d vote on Player of the Year, Hurley said “Yeah. I mean, they’ve got two. It feels like three first-teamers and two guys that are, you know, getting in] each other’s way to get the award . . . Their team is so good that maybe one of them doesn’t get it, Luis or Richmond.”
It would be hard to argue that Ejiofor isn’t the conference’s Most Improved Player. The junior has transformed himself from Joel Soriano’s backup into one of the most fearsome big men in the country.
Eric Dixon of Villanova leads the nation in scoring average (22.9). Big East Preseason Player of the Year Ryan Kalkbrenner of Creighton has done little to change minds about his projections by averaging 18.7 points and 8.5 rebounds.
But if team success is a measure, Hurley may be right and three Red Storm players could find their way onto the all-conference first team.
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.
