March Madness: St. John's Rick Pitino has bag full of slights to help fire up Red Storm

It’s just a sneaky suspicion about what exactly is going on when the St. John’s team is behind closed doors but, after seeing how Rick Pitino has coached the Red Storm over the past three seasons, it would be really interesting to see what they’d be like against potential second-round foe Kansas on Friday night instead of Northern Iowa.

Long before he took the gig at St. John’s before the 2023-24 season, Pitino had a reputation as a master motivator of players. He has continued to be that with the Red Storm. And the world had a firsthand look at it last season when ViceTV produced the docuseries about the Storm’s 31-win season in 2024-25.

In a video clip from the show of his halftime talk with the Storm when they trailed by 13 on the road at Providence in a game they won on a Zuby Ejiofor buzzer-beater — the Miracle at Amica — Pitino hollered, “Where is your [expletive] toughness? Where have you guys been raised that you're so weak mentally that you just [expletive] give up when something doesn't go right for you? . . . You don't [expletive] go down when things go wrong. You dig in and get tougher.”

The events of the past week have given the Hall of Famer more than enough material to work with to get the 10th-ranked Red Storm (28-6) to a fever pitch when they next get on a basketball court. No one should envy the Panthers (23-12), as worthy an adversary as they are, when the teams face off in a 7:10 p.m. East Regional first-round game at Viejas Arena.

We already know that Pitino can get a team fired up. So let’s take a look at a few of the logs he might be putting on that fire to get it red-hot.

First log: There was the No. 5 seed in the East Regional the Red Storm got Sunday when the 68-team draw was revealed. St. John’s didn’t play like a No. 5 seed over the weekend when it demolished the field in the Big East Tournament, capped by beating Connecticut handily in the final, to win that title with the Big East outright regular-season championship.

Second log: The decision to put UConn in the same regional as the Red Storm but at No. 2. There are zero guarantees about how the Storm perform — winning in the NCAA Tournament is incredibly hard — but you can bet St. John’s fans are dreaming of a fourth meeting in the East Regional final (but let not get way, way ahead of ourselves).

Third log: The call to send the Storm to Southern California. San Diego is great, but St. John’s and No. 16 LIU are the teams traveling furthest from their home time zone. Of course, Connecticut under Jim Calhoun made going west the regular prelude to winning a national title.  Historically, however, success diminishes for teams as the time zones away from home increase. And if the Storm get out of the subregional? They get to play in Georgetown’s Capital One Arena, but only after dealing with another cross-country flight.

Fourth log: And this one might burn the hottest because there is a personal element. When the All-American teams were announced on Tuesday, St. John’s star center Zuby Ejiofor wasn’t on any of the first three teams. He was the Big East’s Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year. He is the only high-major player who leads his team in scoring average, rebounding, assists and blocked shots. We’re talking about a guy who will be honored as an all-time St. John’s great next season along with Chris Mullin, Walter Berry and Lou Carnesecca.

Right about now, one can only imagine Pitino getting this team close to boiling over.

The context has to be the game Saturday night against UConn. The teams had split their two meetings, St. John’s winning at the Garden and the Huskies humiliating the Storm in Hartford.

St. John’s attacked that game. It scored the first 10 points of the contest and never let it really get competitive. It was the very best version of the Red Storm we’ve all seen.

St. John’s was a No. 2 seed a year ago and its run was ended very badly in Providence by surging No. 10 Arkansas. Ejiofor felt the sting then, too. So did Sadiku Ibine Ayo, Ruben Prey and Lefteris Liotopoulos. If one doesn’t think the sting has been shared to the stellar group that arrived for this season and won those conference titles, he or she would be mistaken.

As Cincinnati transfer Dillon Mitchell explained before the Big East Tournament, “We understand what they did last year and now it's our year to make it happen . . . Even though we weren't here, we're part of St John's and we represent St John's.”

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.