St. John’s gives UConn brutal beat down to win back-to-back Big East Championships ahead of March Madness

Neither of the two prior games between Connecticut and St. John’s were close affairs.

The first matchup this year saw the Red Storm dominate the six-time national champions, harrying them on defense and beating them by nine. Weeks later, UConn got revenge by shutting down the Johnnies’ offense in Hartford as St. John’s shot 20 percent for the game and missed their final 24 shots.

The expectation was that the Big East Championship game would be a tight-to-the-end final worthy of being played in Madison Square Garden.

It was over within four minutes. St. John’s punched UConn in the mouth early and the dazed Huskies couldn’t recover – losing 72-52 as the Red Storm won back-to-back Big East titles for the first time in school history.

It begs questions for the viability of the Huskies in the NCAA Tournament. Despite putting up 29 wins, their inability to string together consistent results may make them upset fodder in a week’s time.

But the evening was all about Rick Pitino and his Red Storm. A complete performance from St. John’s makes them the first school in Big East history to win the regular season title and the tournament title in consecutive years.

The atmosphere for this game began over 75 miles away from Madison Square Garden at Union Station in New Haven, Connecticut.

Along the way, at each train stop on the southbound New Haven Line, fans of both the Huskies and the Johnnies boarded – traveling full steam ahead to New York City and a grudge match two years in the making.

Madison Square Garden may be at its most feral when the Big East Championship game rolls in. College basketball is an inherently tribal and territorial sport, so when over 19,000 pack the walls of the World’s Most Famous Arena for a contest like this, the noise is palpable and, at times, physically painful.

Saturday was no exception. Dueling ‘Let’s Go Johnnies’ and ‘Let’s Go Huskies’ chants before the national anthem began set the stage, as did the choice of walkout music: Biggie Smalls’ ‘Hypnotize’ for UConn, Tupac’s ‘California Love’ for St. John’s.

Then tipoff came. Control of the glass and the paint was going to be the key to victory for either team and in the first half, St. John’s star and eventual Most Outstanding Player Zuby Ejiofor bullied UConn’s Tarris Reed down low.

UConn didn’t just look out of sorts in the first half, they looked outright overwhelmed and fell into a 17-point deficit. Late in the opening 20 minutes, they turned the ball over off an inbound pass twice – leading to St. John’s points.

Early in the game, referee James Breeding hit Hurley with a technical foul just over a week after the Connecticut coach was ejected for berating another official. 

In the first half, the Huskies shot 36 percent, allowed St. John’s to hit exactly half their shots, committed 11 turnovers and let the Johnnies score 15 points off those cough-ups. In a way, it was a miracle that UConn was only down 13 at that point.

An attempt at a turnaround took effect by the first media timeout of the second half when Connecticut rode a 7-0 run to cut the game closer.

That became a 13-2 run, forcing Pitino to call timeout at 12:14 when the Huskies cut the deficit to seven.

But the Johnnies’ coach perfectly executed a timeout, sapping all UConn momentum, before his team put up an 11-3 run with a punctuation dunk by Dillon Mitchell to make it 58-45.

The entire course of the game could essentially have been embodied in that one run. St. John’s would lead, the Huskies would claw back a little bit, something would happen to halt their positivity, the Red Storm would score again.

Rinse, repeat. The Huskies were never truly in the game. By the time the final buzzer sounded, UConn committed an unthinkable 17 turnovers and didn’t hit a single shot in the final 8:03 of the contest.

Throughout the tournament, the Huskies talked about playing with more joy after a loss to Marquette. After the defeat, the UConn locker room was as silent as a morgue.

Asked by Daily Mail how if he could recapture that joy, Hurley said, ‘[Now] it’s like a new season, really. As important as it is to win your regular season, it’s as important to win your tournament, you know. Unfortunately for this business, you could do all those things, but if you have a bad NCAA tournament, it’s cruel.’

He added, ‘We’ve had a great season, 29-5. We just haven’t had a championship season. And now for us, we’ve got to try to atone for what we didn’t get by just having a great NCAA tournament, making a run.’

Meanwhile, a beaming Pitino praised his cast of players for reaching the mountaintop again.

‘There’s so much history with St. John’s and we brought it all back within three years,’ Pitino told reporters after the win.

To come back from such a devastating loss in Hartford to now, lifting a trophy at center court at Madison Square Garden, fans may have believed that revenge was a motivating factor in what proved to be the ultimate dead rubber match.

‘We never mentioned revenge because we have so much respect for Connecticut,’ Pitino said. ‘We just talked about championship. This is the championship. 

‘It doesn’t matter who we’re playing, it’s a championship at stake. You guys get a chance to be a part of history. It’s a championship. It’s another night to get better and improve. And we did. We improved every single game and we got better.’