How St. John’s has ridden the Rick Pitino Effect back to college basketball’s center stage

NEW YORK — As noon approached on a cold winter Saturday in Midtown Manhattan, the crowd packing Madison Square Garden perked up when Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” began to play in the World’s Most Famous Arena.

The star of this college basketball matinee had arrived.

St. John’s coach Rick Pitino, 72 and dapper as ever in a navy blue suit with white pocket square, appeared from the tunnel that led to the floor. The scene played out on the videoboard above the court for all to see as the chorus hit its crescendo.

This is the Pitino Effect.

Midway through Pitino’s second year in charge, St. John’s basketball is an event again. The Red Storm have yet to lose in 2025, having completed their first unbeaten January since Lou Carnesecca and Chris Mullin were the Kings of Queens and Beasts of the Big East. The Johnnies are regularly making back-page headlines of the New York tabloids.

On Saturday, with a Providence team struggling to stay above break-even in town, 19,196 showed up to watch the Red Storm beat the Friars on a pull-up jumper in the waning seconds by Kadary Richmond.

KADARY. RICHMOND. GAME. pic.twitter.com/rfCrEEYxcG

— St. John’s Men’s Basketball (@StJohnsBBall) February 1, 2025

No. 12 St. John’s (19-3, 10-1) enters the most interesting regular-season week the program has had in at least 25 years — maybe 40 — alone in first place in the Big East, with No. 11 Marquette coming to MSG on Tuesday night and a road game at two-time defending national champion UConn looming on Friday night.

“If anybody didn’t think he was the greatest coach of all time, this (season) at St John’s at 72 and what he’s doing, it just shows you,” Mike Repole, the billionaire businessman and St. John’s alum, told The Athletic. “Everybody’s telling you how tough it is now. And a lot of the older coaches, 55, 60, 65, are getting out, and Rick, he evolved. Wherever he goes, Rick Pitino is a winner.”

St. John’s went all-in on Pitino, giving him another shot at the big time after scandal relegated him to six years outside of high-major college basketball. The return on investment has been everything St. John’s could have hoped for so far.

“We’re watching a living legend on the sideline,” Repole said.

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“And your head coach, Hall of Famer, Rick Pi-teee-noooo!” is how MSG’s public address announcer introduces Pitino. That may be an undersell of the head coach’s accomplishments.

Pitino has won two men’s NCAA Tournament championships, which puts him behind John Wooden (10), Mike Krzyzewski (five), Adolph Rupp (four), Roy Williams, Jim Calhoun and Bobby Knight (three each) and ties him with Dean Smith, Bill Self, Denny Crum and Jay Wright, among others.

Only Pitino, though, has won titles at two schools (Kentucky in 1996 and Louisville in 2013). Only he and John Calipari have taken three different schools to Final Fours, including Pitino’s breakthrough with Providence in 1987 at the age of 34.

And 38 years later, Pitino is on the way to becoming the first coach to lead six different schools to the NCAA Tournament, with St. John’s set to snap its five-year drought this season.

Like many of Pitino’s best squads, this St. John’s team seems to be better than the sum of its parts.

Among the holdovers from last year’s team, RJ Luis Jr. is a reliable scorer and Zuby Ejiofor is one of the best offensive rebounders in the country. Richmond, a Seton Hall transfer who was a first-team all-Big East selection last year, is a versatile 6-foot-6 wing who has been finding his form during the recent surge. The roster’s other marquee transfer, point guard Deivon Smith from Utah, returned to action against Providence after missing four games during the streak with a right shoulder injury.

“One plus one with Coach Pitino equals five,” said former Louisville star Luke Hancock, the most outstanding player of the 2013 Final Four and now an analyst for the ACC Network. “It doesn’t equal two, like with some coaches, and part of that is the belief that he puts into you as a player and as a team.”

“I think Coach has evolved, and I think this is why he’s the greatest coach in our game,” longtime assistant Steve Masiello said. “Because he did it post-NIL, pre-NIL. He’s done it 18 different ways.”

Though in many ways, the same way.

Pitino still runs individual skill drills with his players in the morning — after he gets in his own 5 a.m. workout. He still coaches with a maniacal attention to detail, especially on the defensive end. He demands relentlessness and toughness, both physically and mentally, from his players, though he goes about getting it a little differently these days.

“I am as active as I was when I was 35 years of age,” Pitino said before practice last Friday at MSG. “I have softened a bit with my intensity, only because I just say, ‘How can I get the most out of them?’ And yelling and screaming is not the way to do it.”

But a more mellow Pitino is still demanding, and it took the Red Storm time to adjust.

“Well, I think Year 1, he says a lot of things in ways that people took the wrong way,” said sophomore forward Brady Dunlap, who is out for the season with a core muscle injury that will require surgery. “And I think that’s what kind of hurt our progress early in the year last year. And we were rolling at the end, because we all started to understand it. And this year … the returners have really communicated that to really listen to what he means, not how he says it. And now we’re really starting to just learn from him and not be offended by what he says sometimes.”

The Red Storm seemed to start getting their coach’s message toward the end of last season, following a particularly stinging postgame critique of the roster after a loss to Seton Hall. They responded by closing the regular season on a five-game winning streak that pushed them into NCAA Tournament consideration. The season ended with a loss to UConn in the Big East tournament, where they played the Huskies as competitively as anybody else did last March.

On Saturday, the Johnnies blew a 19-point second half lead to Providence before Richmond’s game-winner with 3 seconds left gave the program its first eight-game winning streak in Big East play since 1992.

Pitino seemed to relish the opportunity after Saturday’s rollicking scene at the Garden to take his streaking team down a notch or two in his postgame news conference. He ran through a litany of defensive breakdowns — defenders backing off 3-point shooters and turning their backs to players they should have been guarding. He scolded his players for allowing their frustrations on the offensive end to impact defensive effort.

It was vintage Pitino.

“I don’t feel good right now because of the way we played the game. So tomorrow I’ll have a much better attitude. Be happy we won. You know, I’ll drink a bottle of Jameson,” he said, quickly adding that he is no longer drinking.

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As a teenager, Repole would take the subway from Queens to watch the greatest St. John’s teams, with Mullin, Walter Berry and Bill Wennington, from the nosebleed blue seats at the Garden.

“I never even thought about going away to college,” Repole said. “But St. John’s was like going away. It was a national school.”

Now Repole flies in from Florida for games and sits courtside, right next to Pitino.

Repole, who founded the company that makes Vitaminwater and owns thoroughbred horses that run in Triple Crown races, had grown frustrated with how his beloved alma mater’s basketball program had floundered through much of this century. St. John’s has made only three NCAA Tournament appearances since coach Mike Jarvis was fired during the 2003-04 season.

In a memorable interview on powerful New York sports radio station WFAN with Mike Francesa in 2019, Repole ripped St. John’s higher-ups, whom he felt had botched numerous opportunities to hire then-up-and-coming coaches such as Dan Hurley when he was with Rhode Island.

With new leadership at St. John’s in 2023, Repole pushed for the school to go after Pitino after the firing of Mike Anderson.

It was a move met with some scrutiny and skepticism. Pitino’s career is dotted with both professional and personal scandals.

The 2013 NCAA championship was later vacated after an investigation found an assistant coach paid escorts and exotic dancers to entertain players and recruits in campus dorms. There were also personal improprieties revealed during a criminal case against a woman who was found guilty of trying to extort Pitino while he was at Louisville. And before Pitino could serve his five-game suspension for the earlier NCAA case, he was fired by Louisville in 2017 when the program was implicated in the FBI’s investigation into corruption in college basketball.

Eventually, Pitino was cleared of wrongdoing for violations revealed by the FBI case.

“Yeah, sure, there’s some reputational risk because of things that have happened before, but I think Rick is at a point in his life where he’s learned from things that have happened in the past,” St. John’s president Fr. Brian Shanley told the Associated Press at Pitino’s introductory news conference at MSG. “I think he’d be the first one to tell you he’s done things that he regrets. Who doesn’t when you get to be that age? I know I have. I’m a believer in forgiveness and new beginnings as a priest, and I think Rick’s going to do a great job for St. John’s.”

For St. John’s, it was not only a risk worth taking, it was a signal that at a transformational time in college sports, when competing at the highest level would require more investment than ever, the school intended to be in the game.

“It’s exactly the vision that I’ve had for this university for 20 years,” Repole said. “College athletics has always been a business. Now it’s as much of a business as ever before.”

Pitino sees players being paid for their name, image and likeness, with a new revenue-sharing structure on the horizon, as an advantage for St. John’s, a school with a large commuter-student population that can’t replicate the on-campus environments found at large state universities in other power conferences.

“They were really struggling to get talent there,” Pitino said. “The NIL has sort of helped us that we can compete on an equal level with our competitors.”

Repole funds more than half of St. John’s NIL budget, but it’s not just basketball success he is after.

“I’m measuring my success with St John’s in two ways: Madison Square Garden with 19,000 fans and St. John’s with record enrollment. If those two things don’t happen, I failed,” he said.

Athletic director Ed Kull, another Queens native who worked for Repole at Vitaminwater in the early 2000s, became Pitino’s “boss” in September after being hired away from Fordham.

Kull sees his job as maximizing the Pitino Effect on all fronts, including a push for donations to St. John’s NIL collective that includes a match of up to $1 million by Repole to be used for “transfer portal and revenue-sharing opportunities ahead.”

MILLION DOLLAR MATCH!!!

Contribute Here:https://t.co/PMxfi8Gsj6#SJUBB #StJohns #NIL #FlatTopFund #CBB #BigEast #Johnnies #RedStorm pic.twitter.com/9ZFoGoZgmm

— Flat Top Fund (@flattopfund) February 3, 2025

“I see it as the centerpiece, where we got to help fundraising, got to help enrollment, got to help our marketing profile, got to help our engagement of alums, got to help in the community,” Kull said. “And that’s what Rick Pitino and basketball is doing at St John’s.”

The game against Providence last Saturday was a few hundred tickets short of being an official sellout at MSG. That might change on Tuesday night, when St. John’s faces Marquette in the first top-15 matchup the Red Storm has hosted since Jan. 30, 1999, when No. 1 UConn played No. 9 St. John’s at the Garden.

Repole wants to recreate a feeling that goes even farther back.

“It’s going to take you back to 1985, man, and it’s a really special thing,” Repole said. “St. John’s job now is to bottle that energy, and bring it back to the university, academically, in admissions, with students and new buildings, and all that. And you know what? I think they will, and that’s what it’s about. Making St John’s not only a great basketball team, but possibly one of the best universities out here.”

(Photo: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Images)