Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00I think most people would be shocked to see that one of the up-and-coming teams in all of college
00:05basketball, a team that's going to probably get a pretty high seed in the NCAA tournament and have
00:10a shot to even win it all, is St. John's. They beat UConn 68 to 62. And Mike, I mean, it seems
00:17to me they're doing it in such different ways. You know, one game I see them having 80-something
00:21points. Over the weekend against UConn, they had 60 points. They did it on defense there.
00:25And Rick Pitino doing one of the best coaching jobs that he's done, probably going back to,
00:31I don't know, Kentucky, something like that. It feels like it's been a long time since he's been
00:34this good. Well, I will say that if you think about the idea that people would be surprised
00:41by St. John's having a successful season, when you remind them that Rick Pitino is their coach,
00:47then they'll say, OK, I get it. Rick Pitino's as good as there's ever been. And what's remarkable,
00:54Craig, about the success of this St. John's team is that if we remember back to the days
01:00of the introduction of the three-point shot, before the Steph Curry revolution, there was
01:05the Rick Pitino revolution. And it wasn't quite as profound, but he was among the very first coaches
01:11to say, hey, this three-point shot thing can do some things, and took Providence to the Final Four
01:17in 1987 with a higher emphasis on the shot than was common at the time. And they made that great
01:27run. And it's always been a big part of his approach. This team can't shoot. They're terrific
01:33in so many ways, but shooting is not one of them. So what they do is they defend you really hard.
01:40They execute at an elite level the baseline out-of-bounds play that they converted in order
01:47to win the game on Friday against UConn was just brilliant. And then the player who's not getting
01:53enough credit, Craig, Qadari Richmond. I had him on my All-America team at midseason. Qadari
01:59Richmond is the biggest reason. They have some terrific players, but there's nobody like him
02:04in college basketball. 6'7", very experienced, very physically powerful, and very intelligent
02:12about how he plays the game. Unbelievably coachable. The coaches at St. John's love him,
02:17and he's a huge reason why they're so successful.