It took until mid-February for Rick Pitino to figure out his team last year. What will be different with just three returning rotation players?
Team: St. John’s Red Storm
2023-24 Record: 20-13, 11-9 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Fifth, two games behind Seton Hall, one game ahead of a tie for sixth place.
Final 2023-24 KenPom.com Ranking: #21 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #59.
Final 2023-24 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #16 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #53.
Postseason: The Red Storm lost by five to UConn in the Big East semifinals and then took their ball and went home because they did not qualify for the NCAA tournament, and yeah, we’ll talk about what exactly happened in a minute.
Key Departures: Nearly everyone that truly mattered for St. John’s last season is gone now. Only one of these departures are a surprise on any level, so it’s important to remember that the current roster turmoil was the plan for the Johnnies to a certain extent.
All three of STJ’s top three scorers were on their final year of eligibility, including Daniss Jenkins, who led the squad in points (14.9) and assists (5.4) last season. I don’t know if we should really call what he did for the Johnnies last year a surprise given that he was a good scorer for Pitino at Iona, but his game did translate to the high major level at the very least. Jenkins was on his fourth year of D1 hoops, but he spent a year in the JuCo ranks in between Pacific and Iona, so that’s five seasons, and now he is on a two-way contract with the Detroit Pistons.
The next two guys on the scoring list were Joel Soriano and Jordan Dingle, who chipped in 13.8 and 11.6 points respectively. Soriano was on his fifth year with the Johnnies after starting his career at Fordham, and he nearly averaged a double-double with a team high 9.5 rebounds per game this past season. If only he hadn’t been a drain on the Johnnies’ defense, who knows what the ceiling could have been for the Red Storm? Dingle was the Ivy League Player of the Year in 2023, but his three-point shot never quite came together the way it did at Penn. Last year might have been his fourth year of playing, but that’s because the Ivy League shut down for COVID, and so Dingle is out of eligibility since the shutdown season doesn’t count against him.
Same goes for Chris Ledlum, who was the 2023 Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year. He started in 30 of his 31 appearances for the Johnnies, but Ledlum never got on the same scoring track that he did for Harvard. Part of that is just the role he played on the St. John’s roster, as he just wasn’t shooting it as much as he was for the Crimson. Still, he just barely missed being a double digit scorer at 9.5 per game, and 6.9 rebounds per night is nothing to laugh at. That lets us wrap up the “out of eligibility” guys with Nahiem Alleyne, who was at Virginia Tech for three years and won a national championship with UConn before spending his fifth bonus year with the Johnnies. Alleyne was arguably STJ’s most reliable three-point shooter, knocking down 38% of his attempts on 2.5 per game in just short of 18 minutes a night.
The other guy in that conversation is Glenn Taylor, who hit 42% on less than two attempts in about as many minutes. Taylor was a part-time starter for the Red Storm, but seeing as 2023-24 was a step back in his role from what he was doing at Oregon State the year before, he has transferred to Oklahoma for his fourth and final year of college hoops. That makes Taylor the only departure with any level of surprise.
Key Returners: There are just three returning rotation players from last season, depending on how you feel about former top 50 prospect Simeon Wilcher returning for his sophomore year after averaging 9.1 minutes while playing in 28 of STJ’s 33 games. That dropped to less than nine minutes a night in Big East play, so decide for yourself there.
Anyway, RJ Luis is the top returning scorer and rebounder for St. John’s after averaging 10.9 and 4.6 respectively a year ago. Shin splints and a fractured hand kept him out of the lineup for all but one game before mid-December last season, but he started 10 times in the remaining 22 outings. Those 10 came in the middle section, which fell into what was arguably the worst run of the season for the Johnnies. Take that for what you will.
The only other two returning guys are Zuby Ejiofor and Brady Dunlap. At least Ejiofor appeared in all 33 games last season, I guess. Can’t say that about Dunlap, who played a bunch of minutes in the middle of the year, but not so much at the start or at the end. The 6’9” Ejiofor averaged 4.3 points and 3.1 rebounds in just over 11 minutes a game, but I don’t think his role as backup big man is likely to change next season. Dunlap officially averaged 3.2 points and 1.5 rebounds in 12.4 minutes per game as a freshman last year, but that’s heavily boosted by a 10 game run in January and the very beginning of February where he started four times and played 20 minutes a night.
Key Additions: Three of the four transfers on the St. John’s roster will only be in New York for one season, and technically, one was already there. That’s Kadary Richmond, who makes the move from Seton Hall to the Red Storm. The 6’6” guard from Brooklyn turned 15.7 points, 7.0 rebounds, and 5.1 assists per game into All-Big East First Team Honors last season. I think we’re all familiar with what Richmond brings to the table after watching him at SHU for the last three years, so let’s move on.
Aaron Scott (6’7”, 200 lb, Spring, Texas) had a breakout season a year ago in his third year with North Texas. He hit career bests in points (11.0), rebounds (5.8) and assists (1.8) per game, and over the past two years, Scott has hit 38% of his three-point attempts. Only 2.3 attempts per game, but hey, he was taking good ones, right? It took Scott three years with the Mean Green to take off, whereas it took three colleges for Deivon Smith (6’0”, 173 lb, Decatur, Georgia) to truly figure it out. After one year at Mississippi State and two at Georgia Tech, Smith blew up for Utah last season, going for 13.3 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 7.1 assists per night while shooting nearly 41% from long range. The last time we saw Smith in a game, he was hanging 28/7/6 and a steal on Indiana State before falling in the NIT semifinals.
Vince Iwuchukwu (7’1”, 240 lb, San Antonio, Texas) is the only new transfer who could stick around in Queens for a minute. He’s been at USC for the past two seasons, and between how things have gone on the court and the coaching change for the Trojans, it makes sense that he’s looking for a fresh start. He has averaged just 5.4 points and 3.4 rebounds in 45 games with 16 starts, and the former top 30 prospect has averaged just 15.7 minutes per game in that stretch. He also suffered a cardiac arrest in July 2022, so the fact that he’s been playing college basketball at all since then is pretty impressive.
The Johnnies also have four freshmen on the roster. Jaiden Glover (6’5”, 195 lb, Brooklyn, New York) is a top 60 shooting guard prospect according to 247 Sports’ Composite rankings, although STJ is listing him as a forward. Khaman Maker (7’0”, 215 lb, Las Vegas, Nevada) adds a lot of size, and 247 says he’s a top 140 prospect. I draw a cutoff line at 150 for “freshmen who could contribute,” so Maker’s right in the tail end of the zone there. The other two freshmen are international players, one from Greece and one from Portugal, with the latter having only been announced in late June.
Coach: Rick Pitino, entering his second season at St. John’s and 37th season as a Division 1 head coach. He has an overall record of 731-303 after stops at (in reverse order) Iona, Louisville, Kentucky, Providence, Boston University, and, after a six game stint as interim head coach to end a season, Hawaii. He also went 192-220 in two seasons with the New York Knicks and four with the Boston Celtics, and he posted a record of 18-19 in two seasons with Panathinaikos in Greece.
Outlook: Let’s see if we can get a handle on how 2023-24 went for St. John’s.
23 voters put St. John’s in the Associated Press preseason top 25, led by Donna Ditota and Dylan Sinn ranking them at #21.
Sinn moved them up to #20 for the first poll of the regular season after they thumped Stony Brook in the opener by 16….. and St. John’s rewarded him by losing by 16 at home to a Michigan team that would win just five more times all season after that.
After beating Utah in the Charleston Classic consolation game — Deivon Smith didn’t play, by the way — St. John’s blew a 66-61 lead with under eight minutes to play and lost 86-80 to Boston College at Barclays Center.
After a 4-1 start to Big East play, St. John’s would go on a 2-8 stretch that culminated in head coach Rick Pitino calling 1) his whole team “unathletic,” 2) the entire roster the “antithesis” of what he wants to do as a coach, 3) the team’s defense “atrocious,” 4) four different players “slow laterally,” 5) Brady Dunlop “physically weak.” Pitino also said that coaching last year’s St. John’s team was “the most unenjoyable experience of my lifetime,” and please remember, this man had to admit in court exactly how little time he spent performing a certain activity in an Italian restaurant.
Here’s the crazy part: St. John’s wasn’t even playing poorly, at least from an efficiency standpoint. For the whole season up to that point, BartTorvik.com had the Johnnies at #25 in the country, and even on that 2-8 stretch, they were still a top 40 team for just over a month. They weren’t bad, they were just losing basketball games.
Here’s the crazier part: Pitino’s tirade apparently got the team’s attention. From there through their loss to UConn in the conference tournament semifinals, St. John’s played like the #12 team in the country according to Torvik. It didn’t make them good on defense which was Pitino’s primary complaint, to be honest. In fact, they were objectively bad at #140 in the country, but the Johnnies were a machine on offense. 132.5 points per 100 possessions, adjusted for opponents, was #3 in the country, and you can win a lot of basketball games that way. St. John’s did just that, winning their last six regular season games and making the Huskies buckle up and take them seriously in the semis.
And then St. John’s missed the NCAA tournament because they had one top 40 win all season.
And then five of their rotation players ran out of eligibility.
And then Pitino replaced them with three more guys who only have one year of eligibility.
Last year, it took Pitino making national news by embarrassing his team to get them to find an extra gear and win basketball games. It’s hard to say how long that awful defense would have held up because they absolutely benefited from getting to play Georgetown twice and DePaul once in the final stretch of the season. But there’s no getting around the fact that STJ did get better after Pitino lost his mind, even though they didn’t have much space to actually get better.
What’s going to be different about 2024-25?
I’ll say the same thing that I said a year ago: If there’s one coach in this league that I trust to take a collection of guys and figure out how to make them win basketball games across a four month season, it’s Rick Pitino. For all of his foibles and missteps away from the basketball court, the guy just knows how to set up a team to succeed. They were playing well last season, they were just losing basketball games, and Pitino was getting that done with a roster that effectively didn’t know each other in May.
That’s kind of where we are again. Three returning rotation players, maybe four depending on how you feel about Simeon Wilcher, none of whom immediately jump out at you as obvious candidates to be The Guy, a bunch of talented transfers even if they are only going to be with the Red Storm for one season, and at least one high-ish profile freshman, although Wilcher’s deployment last season should make you keep your powder dry before you presume that Jaiden Glover’s going to make an impact right away.
Why should I believe that St. John’s is going to be noticeably better in 2024-25? They were the #16 team in the country on BartTorvik.com when the season ended last year, and that didn’t get them into the NCAA tournament. Their preseason Torvik number right now? #15. Am I to believe that things will be different just because Kadary Richmond is going to pull on a red jersey instead of a blue one? Richmond couldn’t drag Seton Hall into the NCAA tournament last year or the year before that, either. What happens if Rick Pitino just can’t quite work his magic for a second straight year in Queens? How much longer is Pitino the head coach for the Red Storm if he misses the NCAAs again?