UConn basketball’s slaughter of St. John’s has Rick Pitino falling on sword

It’s fair to say that UConn basketball beat a Rick Pitino team unlike almost any Rick Pitino team had been beaten before.

On Wednesday, the Huskies shelled Pitino’s 15th-ranked St. John’s Red Storm 72-40, handing the legendary coach one of the most lopsided losses of his career. And Pitino was well aware of that in his brief media session after the game.

“It’s probably only happened to me two times in my career,” Pitino said. “Once was in my first year at Kentucky when we went into Phog Allen [Fieldhouse] at Kansas, but I was playing with very much an inferior team with walk-ons, not with this type of team. It’s all on me. I’m very disappointed in our performance, offensively especially, sharing the ball, moving the ball. It’s all on me.”

Back in 1989, Pitino, then a 47-year-old first-year coach at Kentucky, traveled to second-ranked Kansas for the Wildcats’ fifth game of the season. The result was a 150-95 slaughter by the Jayhawks.

Pitino has had some other bad losses in his career, but none like this since he became St. John’s coach in 2023. According to ESPN, Wednesday’s defeat marked the Red Storm’s “fewest points in a game since scoring 40 against Notre Dame in March 2013” and their “largest loss as an AP-ranked team since March 15, 1960,” when St. John’s lost to St. Bonaventure by 35 points.

How the Red Storm respond to Wednesday’s loss will be critical, considering only three regular-season games remain before the Big East tournament. Entering the game in Hartford, St. John’s had won 13 in a row, with its win streak dating back to Jan. 6, and would have been in the driver’s seat to clinch the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament with a win against UConn, which now has a half-game lead over the Storm in the standings.

St. John’s still can tie atop the Big East at the end of the regular season, but it will need to either win out — against Villanova, Georgetown, and Seton Hall — or rely on the sixth-ranked Huskies to lose to Seton Hall and/or Marquette.

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