This all really started for Rick Pitino, in all the most important ways, in Providence. Now it is where he and his St. John’s team play their first round game on Thursday in one more NCAA Tournament for Pitino, after what feels like a hundred of them in his basketball life already.
Here is something Pitino said to Kevin McNamara in the Boston Globe the other day of his Providence experience, and his team’s great basketball adventure in March of 1987: “I learned [there] to never stop dreaming.”
Now, of course, he has much bigger dreams for St. John’s.
He had already coached as an assistant at Syracuse and at Boston University and then as an assistant with the Knicks before he got to Providence College. But that Providence team put him up on the map as more than a hot kid. Led by Billy Donovan, who went on to win a couple of national championships as a coach at Florida, they all got hot in March and didn’t lose until the Syracuse game in the national semifinals. It was also an NCAA Tournament that began with tragedy for Pitino and his wife, Joanne, with the death of their 6-month-old son, Daniel.
But perhaps Pitino’s career doesn’t happen exactly the way it did without some March Madness in the second round that year, against Austin Peay. It was 82-82 with two seconds left, and an Austin Peay guy named Bob Thomas had a one-and-one that might have won the game if he’d only made the first free throw. He didn’t. The game went to overtime. Providence won and kept winning and when the tournament was over, Pitino became the new coach of the Knicks.
“I wouldn’t have been coach of the Knicks if it wasn’t for that Providence team,” he said, speaking of Donovan and Delray Brooks and the rest of the players who pretty much shocked the college basketball world that spring.
A few years later, after Pitino had left the Knicks to take the Kentucky job, Pitino’s team lost one of the heartbreak games in college history, against Duke, in the Eastern Regional finals in Philly, when Grant Hill threw it the length of the court to Christian Laettner with 1.2 seconds left and, well, you know.
Pitino would eventually win a national championship there and another at Louisville (the last, in 2013, vacated by the NCAA because of a sex scandal involving players and recruits) and leave Louisville because of another recruiting scandal for which Pitino has always denied being complicit but said a few years ago that, as the head of the program, “I deserved to be fired.”
Rick Pitino has been through a lot. He has also been one of the brilliant college coaches of all time, and now he is about to start another NCAA Tournament with a St. John’s team that made the kind of run through the Big East season and through the Big East Tournament that his underdog Providence team made through the tournament nearly 40 years ago. It has been some remarkable basketball life, with good and bad and so much winning. But in so many ways, and whatever happens in Providence and — hopefully for St. John’s — beyond, what has happened this season must feel like the best of it for him, whether he somehow takes a third program to a Final Four or not.
“I learned [at Providence] that anything is possible,” Pitino said.
This is his second year at St. John’s, of course, after returning to college basketball at Iona after a coaching exile in Greece. His first St. John’s team probably should have made the ’24 tournament but did not. This team was expected to be good, but you wonder if even Pitino thought it would be this good. And because it is this good as a No. 2 seed and despite how tough the West Region is, Pitino is as big a story as his team, and again looks like as big a guy in college basketball coaching as there is.
He is back in play. If St. John’s gets past Omaha in the first round, the Red Storm will either get Kansas in the second round, or Pitino’s old friend (well, now) John Calipari and Arkansas in the second round. At which point, the lights will be turned up much brighter than they already are on Pitino’s New York team.
If you have watched the season play out, on television or in Carnesecca Arena or to packed houses at the Garden, you know why Pitino’s team, playing Pitino ball, is so appealing. On defense, they pick up the other team as soon as it gets off the bus, and they share the ball, and scrap, and — much like Pitino’s last great Louisville team — they don’t need to pour in 3’s on the other team to beat you. And they come back.
And there he is on the sidelines, so often in a crouch with his hands clasped behind him, wearing tailored suits in a time when most coaches show up in warmups, watching this team play the way he wants it to play, demands that it play. Or else. There are no Cooper Flagg’s on St. John’s, but there are all these tough-minded and talented players so much fun to watch, RJ Luis Jr. and Zuby Ejiofor and Kadary Richmond and Deivon Smith, who powered through the Big East Tournament with a shoulder injury.
Is Florida loaded, if Pitino’s guys make it that far? Yeah, Florida looks loaded, and is playing as well as anybody. Can St. John’s win this region and make it to what would be Pitino’s 8th Final Four. Absolutely they can. At this point in the season, the only one that matters, they are as tough an out as there is.
It all begins on Thursday, In Providence. Where it really all began for Rick Pitino. It seems like a perfect place, in another March, to begin another run.