NEW YORK – A year ago, Big East was a turmeric league, and the summit of college basketball was claimed by Dun Harley. The man was in the process of solidifying his legendary qualification by leading the greatest husky team of all time to a Big East Championship sweep and a 37-3 record. Backing the national title.
Those husky were very amazing – it was Harley and the staff who built around him that were very mercilessly efficient – the UConn program, which had to replace four NBA draft picks, is now I was given more than the advantages of doubt heading into the season (Preseason Ranking: No: No.
How good is UConn? Is it another great thing? Will Harley’s willpower and his new added strength keep Connecticut at the top of the college basketball sniffing, keeping everyone at the top of the sniff of college basketball kicking, pushing, and squeezing his elbow?
If you’ve been following sports for the past three months, you know the answer. Harley and his husky were thrown at us from the summit. Virtually everything else The infamous uconn results after 0-3 at the Maui Invitational It felt like a compelling rodent derailment and dramatic pendulum swing after the most statistically dominant two-year NCAA tournament in modern history.
There’s an excellent in-league road victory over Clayton and Marquette, but a horrifying February 15th over Setonhole, who was 209th in Kenpom as of Sunday night and only had one other big east scalp There is also road loss. . Beyond that, there were previously praised victories (Baylor, Gonzaga, Texas, Xavier) that looked good in December, but it has since lost its value. Nowadays they are all bubble teams and are not better than 9-10 seeds.
Take me to what happened on a Sunday afternoon at Madison Square Garden. St. John’s 89, UConn 75.
How dramatically the Earth can move under the feet of this sport? The summit transforms into a swamp. Every year, the roster changes, just like human behavior. That’s why hope continues forever in all sports. Teams can go from great to good or even worse, but other teams will appear to take over territory and become new conquerors.
Hello, St. John’s.
On February 3, 2024, UConn entered MSG, winning 77-64, with about half the fans in the building. Rick Pitino wasn’t happy about it.
On Sunday, the Red Storm crowd looked nearly 70%. The arena was soaked in Crimson lighting as pre-match hype video won a co-jump, with SJU fans overtaking UConn supporters just before the chip.
“I can assure you that most of the fans were there tonight, and we didn’t do that last year,” Pitino said. “But our fans were there a lot tonight.”
St. John’s I pulled out a victory from the road that appeared on UCONN 16 days agoit shows potential changes to the Big East security guards. Sunday was the official transition for 10th place Red Storm, who won the season for the 24th victory.
Pitino needed everything 22 months to turn the flounder program over the majority of its existence this century. (In March 2023, Pitino was Iona’s coach and began his advantage after losing to UConn in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.)
His reconstruction of Pitino’s Renaissance and St. John’s is one of the best stories in college basketball. And as the best moon of the year is waiting around the corner, speeding up.
“We thought we had the best game of the season,” Pitino said.
Tomorrow’s Top 25 Today: St. John’s is set to rise to college basketball rankings after beating UConn
Kyle Boone
Connecticut once belonged to St. John’s. The unranked husky, who suffered a loss for the ninth season, is in a dangerous recession that saw him lose three of his last five (and almost the fourth), Bringing vihhind-behind-behind home victory at the beginning of the week vs.villanova). Harley said Sunday was their most moraleful defeat since the dangers of the Paradise in November.
“We’re too many flaws,” Harley admitted after his defeat. “There are a few teams that aren’t very good for us, unlike past teams that literally didn’t have a bad matchup for us.”
This is Dan Harley. This is uconn. Are there too many defects?
But that’s true.
The Red Storm wrestled with Big East control and changed the hierarchy of this meeting much faster than you might have imagined.
Consider:
UConn’s eight-game winning streak at MSG is an overscoring hit. Johns won his first 19 straight regular season home games from 1964-666, who had not beaten two consecutive Top 100 Kenpom teams for over two months. Johns has 15 league wins for the first time since ’84-85
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Johnny’s crew, who averaged 6.1 games, scored seven pointers in the first 16 minutes. Sju was caught up in 8/19 from 3, surpassing the seasonal rate by 11.9% points (42.1-30.2).
The 50-32 half-time margin was UConn’s biggest gap since 2019.
“Clearly for us, you play against this team with that defense and its rebound, and those types of wings and (Zuby) Ejifio, and pressure they can put on the paint. It’s a problem for everyone. It’s going to happen,” Harley said.
The Harley team scored the deficit at 9 with 12:32 left. Junior forward Alex Caravan finished with a team high of 17 points.
Sju did it by getting this unusual feat with all the starters who scored at least 12 points.
“For us this year, our defenses won’t take everything away,” Harley said.
Stepping in, Cuddary Richmond insisted on performing. Pitino said 99% of players didn’t play in the game, but it’s not Richmond, which handles two pulled gro diameters. St. John’s knows very well the performances UCONN knows well…that’s because Huskies did on the team for most of 2023 and 2024.
It would have been good to see Hurley and Pitino match Wits and fight for close results in UConn’s revenge game, but that’s not the case for either team.
This is the St. John’s team we have promised. It’s not the UConn team I wanted the most.
Pitino’s team has a road game with Butler, a home finale against Seton Hall and a road game with Marquette to close the regular season. Clayton, second place, has two games. This will happen: St. John’s is set to win the Big East title for the first time since 1991-92.
And, except for the collapse, Red Storm will have its first standalone Big East Crown since 1984-85. That season included the final four runs. This is the last in the school history.
Sunday was the latest obvious example of how fleeting domination in college athletics takes place. UCONN may return in the best order of the sport as the third-place recruiting class arrives in 2025, but it’s time for St. John’s.
This is what happens when you have a great coach in your league. No one has promised ownership of the summit.
