Rick Pitino is not in the mood to reflect.
Not yet.
Not after No. 6 St. John’s finished off a historic 27-4 regular season that included an 18-2 mark in Big East play.
Not after the program’s first outright conference regular-season championship since 1985.
And certainly not with the Big East Tournament looming.
“I’m very grateful for the type of team I have, but maybe sometime in June or July, I’ll just be on the beach and be very thankful for the season,” Pitino said after Saturday’s 86-84 overtime win at Marquette in the regular-season finale.
“Right now, I’m just laser-focused on the next Big East game, the next practice. I’m not patting ourselves on the back.”
Pitino, 72, knows what’s at stake.
His red-hot Red Storm enter this week’s Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden as the top seed for the first time since 1986. They have a first-round bye and won’t play until Thursday afternoon, when they face the winner of Wednesday’s game between Providence (13-18) and Butler (12-19).
St. John’s seeks to win the conference tournament for the first time since 2000, which is the same year they last won an NCAA Tournament game.
“We’ve been doing historic things all season,” senior guard Kadary Richmond said.
“It’s March. It’s time to close in, prepare well, get wins and play every game like it’s your last.”
Now in their second season under Pitino, the Johnnies enter the Big East Tournament as the favorite to win it. They are 9-0 at the Garden, where they play many of their home games against conference opponents.
Behind an experienced roster, St. John’s leads the Big East in points (78.6) and rebounds (40.8) per game while limiting opponents to a conference-best 66.3 points per game.
“Our entire thing is to do whatever it takes to win,” said junior forward Zuby Ejiofor, the Big East’s Most Improved Player. “It doesn’t always look pretty on every single night. It doesn’t matter. We fight through adversity. We’re a gritty team.”
But St. John’s is far from the only worthy contender in this week’s tournament.
Second-seeded Creighton (22-9) dealt St. John’s a rare loss this season and boasts 7-1 center Ryan Kalkbrenner, who averages 19.4 points, 9.0 rebounds and 2.7 blocks per game. The fifth-year senior just won Big East Defensive Player of the Year for the fourth time.
Led by head coach Dan Hurley, third-seeded UConn (22-9) is the reigning Big East Tournament winner and the two-time defending NCAA champ. Many players from those teams are gone, but there’s no shortage of talent, starting with freshman forward Liam McNeeley, an expected lottery pick.
St. John’s would not face Creighton or UConn until the final on Saturday, but Friday’s semifinal could spell a meeting with fourth-seeded Xavier (21-10) or fifth-seeded Marquette (22-9), who both took the Red Storm to overtime this season.
That level of competition is why Pitino began preaching extra urgency before the regular-season finale.
“I said, ‘This is your one and done. You lose this game, the season’s over.’ That’s the way you’ve got to play it to prepare for March Madness,” Pitino said. “You don’t just show up in March and say, ‘OK, this is what we’re going to do.’ You prepare for it now. You prepare for it at the Big East Tournament.”
Pitino won the Big East Tournament in 2009, 2012 and 2013 as the head coach at Louisville. He led Kentucky to a national championship in 1986 and Louisville to another in 2013.
He knows winning the Big East Tournament could prove valuable in the eyes of the Selection Committee in terms of NCAA Tournament seeding.
“Probably, if we win out, we can get a two-seed, which would be great,” Pitino said. “At the beginning of the year, everybody … that follows the Johnnies said, ‘Just make the tournament. Just make the tournament.’ And they’ve all been elated.”
It’s a far cry from last year, when St. John’s needed a deep run in the conference tournament for a chance to make the Big Dance for the first time since 2019. The Johnnies lost to UConn in the Big East Tournament semifinal and were ultimately left out of March Madness.
St. John’s begins this year’s conference tournament on a six-game win streak, though each of the last three victories came in close contests.
It only gets more difficult from here.
“We’re going to fix the little mistakes and we’re going to get ready for the Big East Tournament,” leading scorer RJ Luis Jr. said, “because that’s what we want to win, too.”
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