Roger Rubin: Rick Pitino deserves to be appreciated for everything he's accomplished
St. John's coach Rick Pitino celebrates with his team after earning his 900th win following a NCAA basketball game against Xavier on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Credit: Getty Images/Jeff Dean
CINCINNATI — Rick Pitino hit another milestone in a career filled with them on Saturday afternoon.
St. John’s erased a 16-point second-half deficit for an 88-83 Big East win over Xavier and coach Richard Pitino, Rick’s son, at Cintas Center. The triumph gave Pitino 900 career wins, moving him past Bob Knight on the all-time list into sole possession of fourth place.
There were some special bells and whistles that came with it. Richard Pitino, an assistant coach with Rick for three seasons at Louisville, eschewed his usual warmup gear; he and his staff wore suits. Afterward, the St. John’s players donned T-shirts to mark the occasion and showered the coach with water and sports drinks in the locker room.
Pitino, 73, had played down the intrigue of coaching against his son for the milestone victory — almost as if it were a happy coincidence — but the Red Storm players saw it differently.
As Dylan Darling said, “He won’t say he really wanted this one, but we all know he really wanted this one against his son. And honestly, it was just really fun to be able to pull that through and see him like that.”
“I’m happy that he won No. 900 — I think he’s the best coach that’s ever coached college basketball,” Richard Pitino said. “To see him coaching great, being celebrated at St. John’s, it’s keeping him young.”
Certainly the occasion of recording his 900th career victory is a great occasion to look back on in what has been a remarkable college coaching career that started 50 years ago.
There have been many high points on the journey. In the early years, it was taking Boston University to its first NCAA Tournament in 24 seasons — coincidentally the year after Richard Pitino was born — before he began to create a legacy as the great rebuilder of programs.
That started with taking over a moribund program at Providence and in two years getting the Friars to the 1987 Final Four. He took over scandal-plagued Kentucky, quickly turned the Wildcats into a powerhouse and won a national title. He resuscitated dormant power Louisville and turned it into a national force, winning the 2013 national championship game.
But this also was a moment to look at what is going on for Pitino right now with the Red Storm.
St. John’s (15-5, 8-1) is starting to roll again, just as it had in his previous two seasons at the helm. It has won six in a row and appears likely to be back in the national rankings when the AP Top 25 is released on Monday.
Pitino has done many things for many programs, but what he’s doing at St. John’s requires some appreciation.
St. John’s has become a national destination for top players who want to succeed. The attendance for games has skyrocketed during the past three years and season ticket sales are up approximately 40%. The school has brands such as adidas seeking to outfit it.
The days of playing four or five home games at Madison Square Garden are a thing of the past; this season the Red Storm are playing 13 dates at The World’s Most Famous Arena, including the preseason exhibition against Michigan in November.
More to the point, St. John’s has become a talking point for college basketball fans nationwide. The array of networks that the Big East struck deals with before the season constantly want the Red Storm on in prime time.
And of course, they now are going back to NCAA Tournaments.
When Pitino was introduced as the new head coach in March 2023, he promised to bring St. John’s back to the elite level at which it had existed under icon Lou Carnesecca. It would be hard to argue that he hasn’t fulfilled that promise.
The landscape of college basketball changed dramatically with the influx of money, the ability for players to be paid and the way players can go from school to school via the NCAA transfer portal.
The changes turned off many coaches who didn’t want to play the game on this new terrain. Pitino deserves credit for choosing to embrace it. More than anything, he wants to win — and right now he wants to win at St. John’s — and so he has learned a new system and adapted to it.
Sometimes he pines for the way things were on the old terrain; players stuck around a program for a few years and he could develop them. Now there is only a little of that. Now the challenge is bringing older players together and getting them to function as if they’d been a unit for much longer.
We’ve seen it’s a bumpy process. None of Pitino’s three Red Storm teams got off to a good start. Each had flaws that needed to be overcome — poor outside shooting or a lack of a true point guard, for example — but he helped those squads find ways to win.
“I’ve always hoped that we get to another Final Four, get to another championship, but I’ve never thought about number of wins,” Pitino said.
Coaches hit milestones, and often it is something that causes us to look back on accomplishments. But what Pitino is doing right now is quite an accomplishment, and it has to be appreciated in this moment as well.
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.
