Rick Pitino probably doesn’t think he’s all the way back, because when you’ve won the way Pitino has won and shown yourself to be one of the best basketball coaches who ever lived, he probably won’t believe he’s all the way back until he wins another national championship. Or at least makes it back to another Final Four.
But what is not in dispute, as Pitino and his St. John’s team get ready for a pretty wonderful basketball moment on Sunday, at Madison Square Garden, against UConn, is that he has now merged his own comeback story with the comeback story of St. John’s basketball, like a perfectly designed play. And because he is a city kid who grew up to coach the Knicks at the Garden, first as Hubie Brown’s assistant in the 1980s and later as head coach, this is a pretty great New York story.
But the biggest reason of all for what we are seeing and what Pitino and his players are experiencing, especially under the big top at the Garden, the biggest and best part of this, is that Pitino’s team is playing New York basketball.
Oh, sure. They are tough and smart and resilient and clearly will play you all the way to the bus. This is not just a style of basketball that fans of the city are embracing with these Garden sellouts. It is a style of ball that they completely understand.
This was what feels like a hundred years ago, when Pitino was a kid assistant coach sitting next to Brown, and we were in Boston for a Knicks-Celtics game, at the bar in the team’s hotel, late.
“Here’s one of the things about basketball you have to love,” he said. “I’ve got my vision of how it should look. Somebody else might have another. But if we all do it right, and get our players to buy in, we both can win.”
He had worked for Jim Boeheim at Syracuse and then first became a boy wonder at Boston University, which is where my friend Bob Ryan, as great a basketball writer as there has ever been, described him as “Mozart” because of the way his vision of basketball looked on the floor. Then it was the taking a Providence team that belonged nowhere near a Final Four to a Final Four, and getting the Knicks job, and then winning a national championship at Kentucky; then leaving Kentucky when he should have stayed to take over the Celtics.
Then he was back in college basketball at Louisville and winning a national championship there, even if the NCAA vacated it later. Then came recruiting scandals and personal scandals there that resulted in him not just getting fired, but becoming radioactive to the point where, after the career he’d had, after the two titles and seven trips to the Final Four with three different schools, he had become unemployable in this country.
It is why just six years ago, in his mid-60s, he was coaching Panathinaikos, a professional team in Athens. Pitino will come to Sunday’s game against Danny Hurley’s two-time defending champs from UConn from so many different directions. But he will also come all the way to it from Greece, because he was willing to go halfway across the world to still be a basketball coach, and still have a game.
“It’s an adjustment,” he said at the time to The Ringer’s John Gonzalez, who went over there to do a story about Pitino that is very much worth reading now to fully understand exactly how far Pitino has come. “I’m by myself.”
Everybody knows how it played out after that: He came back to the States to coach Iona, and from Iona he went to St. John’s, and a program that had become so vastly diminished the way Pitino’s brand had been so vastly diminished after he left Louisville the way he did. Now, one more time and probably for the last time for Pitino, he has reinvented himself and reinvented St. John’s basketball at the same time. And it has been something to see, as he gets one more team to buy in and play the game he thinks these players should be playing.
On a weekend when the Knicks have such important and defining games against the Cavaliers and the Celtics, both games on the road, Friday night and Sunday, it is a St. John’s team that will once again sell out the Garden and light up the Garden. It will be St. John’s basketball that feels like the main event, even on a day when the Knicks are going up against the Celtics in their Garden in Boston.
“I have no idea what’s next,” Pitino told Gonzalez in 2019.
Iona was next, and before long he was back in the NCAA Tournament. And back in play. Then St. John’s came calling. Now here he is and here they are, another tough, smart Pitino team: RJ Luis, Jr. (who sat out Wednesday night’s road win against DePaul) and Kadary Richmond and Zuby Ejiofor and Sadiku Ibine Ayo and the rest of the ballers Pitino has assembled. They beat a pretty tough, smart Creighton team at the Garden last Sunday afternoon and now they get UConn, whom they’ve already beaten on the road in Storrs. They are back in the Top 10 and back at the top of the Big East. In so many ways, it was a season like this and a team like this and a story like this that was next for Rick Pitino.
Now he and his team get a Sunday like this against the defending champs, even if it has been a hard road for UConn this season. They get another moment in a season that has been full of them, one that must feel like a million miles from Athens for their coach, whose road home really started there.
