STORRS, Conn. — The moment when Rick Pitino succumbed to the problems of his modern reality came during the preseason.
Pitino’s team at St. John’s, just like his teams at Louisville and Kentucky, and at Iona and in Greece, and with the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics, spent early workouts going through individual sessions overseen by the head coach. Such one-on-ones are grueling to watch, let alone to endure. Fifteen shots in 30 seconds. Or timed attempts darting around stations scattered all over the court. Over and over. Pitino, the whole time, stands, hands behind his back, shouting directions until the player in front of him stands atop a pool of sweat. All along, every shot is counted and added to a tally. Those numbers, in part, determine how Pitino later decides who can shoot from where and when in what games. Sound strategy. He’s won everywhere.
But then came this preseason at St. John’s. Every day ended with an autopsy revealing a fatal flaw.
St. John’s couldn’t shoot.
“The lowest metrics I’ve seen from my team, ever,” Pitino recently told me.
Pitino and his staff could have very well taken the Sisyphean route. More reps. More shots. More 3s until the numbers changed. Instead, a far simpler decision. Shoot closer.
This is what basketball looked like in bygone eras. There are caves out there with pictographs depicting men and women taking mid-range shots and long 2-pointers. Such play has been replaced by our modern analytic-focused game, a world where efficiency and shot quality carry the highest value. Rightly so. The most valuable shots are close to the basket and beyond the 3-point line. Fairly simple.
Only Pitino didn’t have such options. So, before this team ever played a game, he began devoting parts of his most valuable resource — those individual workouts — to players operating in what most other programs now consider no-man’s-land. Pitino’s 42-minute one-on-one training sessions began including 20 minutes of pull-up 15-footers, and mid-range shots off curls, and all variety of floaters. Many of the same timed shooting routines he used for 3-point shots were reimagined on the fly. Pitino says he “went with Durant,” a nod to Kevin Durant, the modern God of Midrange. Each of St. John’s primary scoring threats, from scoring guard Kadary Richmond and Simeon Wilcher, to do-all wings RJ Luis and Aaron Scott, not only practiced such shots, but were granted permission to take the type of looks that would cause any analytic-subscribed coach to hyperventilate.
This is the same Rick Pitino who, back when the 3-point line was first introduced, and immediately panned by many college coaches as an abomination, embraced the evolution. He put down tape on the floor and demanded his Providence players only shoot from behind those lines. The Friars eventually shot themselves into the Final Four and Pitino secured his place as a founding father in the game’s embrace of the 3.
Now he’s doing the exact opposite.
And if you want to understand why Pitino is in the Naismith Hall of Fame, and why his teams always seem to be so damn good, and why, at age 72, he’s turned doormat St. John’s into the class of the Big East in only Year 2 on the job, this is where you start.
And then you go into a hallway in the bowels of Gampel Pavilion, following a snatch-and-grab 68-62 win over two-time defending national champion Connecticut, and you ask how does the same guy who modernized the game flip the switch back to peach baskets and set shots.
“It was easy to recognize,” Pitino said. “If (shooting) is not your team’s strength, but you’re great defensively, you gotta go with what you got. I’ve never had this type of team. So I had to change what I do.”
That’s about as uncomplicated as it gets. Except taking midrange shots and long 2s is one thing, but making them is another.
St. John’s, now at 21-3 overall this season, and alone in first place in the Big East at 12-1, is inordinately good at making high-degree of difficulty shots. Probably, in part, because the players work at it. In the win over UConn on Friday night, Pitino’s team made 9 of 26 shots at the rim, 4 of 21 3-pointers, and an absurd 13 of 18 shots between the paint and 3-point line. The game’s decisive play was one most modern basketball fans would deem a terrible shot. On a baseline inbound with 3 seconds remaining on the shot clock and 12 seconds remaining on the game clock, with St. John’s leading by two, assistant coach Bob Walsh drew up a counter that resulted in Luis taking a catch-and-shoot jumper from about 19 feet out, just inside the arc, from the side of the basket.
Luis drilled it. Silence hung like chalk dust. Gampel emptied.
Afterward Dan Hurley twisted his face, as he’s wont to do. The UConn coach is exactly 20 years younger than Pitino and has exactly as many national titles — two. Growing up, Hurley was a camper at Howard Garfinkel’s famed Five-Star Basketball Camp when Pitino was counselor. He has essentially lived his entire basketball life watching Pitino as one of the greatest coaches in the sport. Now, all this time later, it’s Hurley who holds such a spot, and somehow Pitino is still here. The differences and the similarities between the two are profoundly entertaining. So too is how much one wants to beat the other.
Hurley, a devotee to current shot quality convention, wants opposing teams to take bad shots. Every coach does. He wants opposing players taking shots off the dribble, shots from the midrange (“middies,” Hurley calls ’em) and contested shots. Problem is, that’s exactly what St. John’s does.
“Like, those 15-17 footers?” Hurley said. “You’re … you know … as a defense, you kind of don’t mind those. But then, these guys are really proficient at it. So … yeah.”
Hurley, college basketball’s poet laureate of self-loathing, added, “I don’t know how I feel about it.”
He’s not the only one. Opposing teams are stuck trying to figure out how to beat a team that is scoring nearly 60 percent of its points on 2-point baskets (best among all high-major teams) and holding opponents to under 44 percent shooting on 2s. What’s starting to gain more and more attention is that many of this team’s analytical anomalies bear a resemblance to a certain Louisville team in 2012-13.
Pitino’s crude de evolution is only part in parcel to St. John’s overall success. Firstly, the defense is its own story, one with gruesome scenes of asphyxiation. Then there’s the maniacal rebounding. And a brand of physicality that Marquette coach Shaka Smart recently praised at “incredible violence.” Then there are all the individuals, notably Luis and Richmond, who are as talented as they are unrelenting.
But at the root, it’s the adaptability of finding different ways to win.
That’s why, a few hours before the UConn game, after a late morning shootaround at Gampel, Pitino called his team in for a huddle. This was a game being played on only two day’s rest with limited prep. It was going to be a matter of going out and making plays. “You are a great defensive team,” Pitino told the group, “but you are so much better offensively than the way you play.”
The message?
“Just shoot your shots,” he said.
(Photo: Porter Binks / Getty Images)
