For what seems like the entire season, college basketball fans have been waiting for UConn to start clicking. The back-to-back national champions have struggled all season long after losing much of their roster from the last two years, and those hard times continued on Sunday with a blowout 89-75 loss to No. 10 St. John’s at Madison Square Garden.
This is UConn’s second loss to Rick Pitino and the Johnnies this month after the Red Storm picked up a gritty 68-62 win in Storrs on Feb. 7. After seeing the best team in the Big East up close and personal twice this month, UConn head coach Dan Hurley praised St. John’s in his postgame press conference, via Kevin Connelly of Storm the Paint.
“They are elite,” Hurley said, per Connelly. “They have a championship level defense. They have a championship level offensive rebounding.”
St. John’s suffocated UConn on the defensive end for most of the two games that they played against each other this season. The Huskies turned the ball over 22 times in the first meeting and 18 times on Sunday, leading to tons of Red Storm points. Even after UConn got off to a good start offensively, the Johnnies were able to hold the Huskies down for most of the first half to build a big lead.
The defense wasn’t the story on Sunday for St. John’s like usual. Instead, it was an outlier offensive performance that helped Pitino’s squad get out to a massive lead in the first half. Despite coming into the game as one of the worst and most low-volume 3-point shooting teams in college basketball, St. John’s shot 8-for-16 from beyond the arc in the opening 20 minutes.
“If they shoot the ball like that from the perimeter, they’re going to be a problem for anyone,” Hurley said, according to UConn basketball beat writer Sam Calhoun.
Even though St. John’s didn’t make a 3-pointer in the second half, it had more than enough cushion to pull away and run away with the comfortable win. Now, the Johnnies have a three-game lead in the Big East standings with three games to go while UConn inches closer and closer to the bubble.
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