Rick Pitino's collection of talent at St. John's still needs to find its identity
St. John's forward Zuby Ejiofor looks on against the Iona Gaels in the second half of an NCAA men’s basketball game at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 13, 2025. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
WASHINGTON — It was just minutes after St. John’s had lost to Kentucky in Atlanta that Zuby Ejiofor declared it a look-in-the-mirror moment for the Red Storm.
The loss not only was their fourth defeat in four tries against teams that are or have been nationally ranked, but also the one that was going to usher a team that began as the No. 5 team in the country out of the Top 25.
The question now is what St. John’s sees staring back when it looks.
Certainly each individual player, including Ejiofor, sees someone who could be doing a lot more to make the Red Storm a better team.
Players don’t rebound enough, especially after the improved defense gets an opponent to miss a shot; St. John’s allows 34.5% of those missed shots to go for offensive rebounds, and it’s a far-worse 41.7% when the opponent is from a power conference. Despite a proven acumen for three-point shooting, they hesitate at open looks. And after blowing leads in all of those four losses, each player can see someone looking back who didn’t help close out resume-building signature win.
But collectively, what do they see? Have the Storm found an identity? They get into the thick of Big East play with the 8 p.m. New Year's Eve contest against Georgetown (9-4, 1-1) at Capital One Arena, but what will be the tools the Storm (8-4, 1-0) use to take down conference foes going forward to defend their regular season and tournament championships?
It was around this time last season that the 2024-25 St. John’s team discovered exactly what it was. They won the Miracle at Amica, the astounding comeback victory at Providence on Ejiofor’s buzzer beater, and the team’s personality came into focus.
Yes, that Red Storm team had what should have been a fatal flaw, poor shooting, but it also had an unquenchable will to win. It shined through as they bonded together to become the second-ranked defensive team in the country and one of the five most relentless rebounding teams in the land. Using those two tools, St. John’s went 18-2 in Big East play and then went on to win the conference tournament.
Does this third Rick Pitino-coached St. John’s team have the same will? Is it committed to transforming in order to win?
“One of Coach Pitino's favorite sayings is ‘nothing changes, if nothing changes,’” Ejiofor said. “So as far as the rest of the season and how it’s going to go? . . . The non-conference [wasn’t] exactly how we wanted it to go. So everybody’s just really got to understand that there’s got to be some changes internally. Just figure out different ways you can impact winning other than just scoring.”
Scoring was the primary directive in the offseason as Pitino brought in via the NCAA transfer portal a bunch of scorers with a track record for shooting well, in addition to a defensive ace in Dillon Mitchell and a high-performing mid-major point guard in Dylan Darling.
At the dawn of the season, it sounded like he envisioned a team that played fast and that opponents would struggle to keep pace with. And the defense? He’d bring the defense along to make the Storm complete. St. John’s may have started looking like an offensive dynamo, but it has only been one in spurts of late.
The solution this time around may be the same as the one last year, defense and rebounding, if the team shows its commitment. Pitino didn’t exactly communicate he was seeing it when he issued a statement on Monday that said, in part, “Our practices have been difficult with guys trying to get back in shape from having three days off [for Christmas].”
That kind of sounds like a shot across the collective bow.
Ejiofor and fellow returners Sadiku Ibine Ayo, Ruben Prey and Lefteris Liotopoulos saw the value of commitment as last season’s team gained an identity along with the tools to overcome shortcomings. Ejiofor clearly believes it can happen again with this group of players.
“It’s a tougher schedule this time around, but we had . . . the same sort of trying to figure out the defensive identity,” Ejiofor recalled. “And by this time [of year] . . . we started getting a lot better, which we are with this group as well.
“Especially with us going into the conference [schedule],” he added, “there's got to be a switch [from] everything that happened in the non-conference [games]. There's lessons to be learned from the non-conference, but we have a championship to defend.”
As the calendar turns to a new year, we will see what the Storm are really made of and if the lessons have been learned.
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.
