St. John’s head coach, Rick Pitino, knows that opportunities like this will not last forever.
Perhaps that is why, on the eve of his 76th career NCAA Tournament game, the 72-year-old acknowledged his career mortality and his team’s first-round game with No. 15 Omaha on Thursday night in Providence with content acceptance.
The Hall-of-Fame head coach is simply trying to take it all in and enjoy it.
“I’ve been blessed for a long period of time. Fifty-plus years of coaching,” Pitino said on Wednesday. “I look at it this way: I don’t know if God will bless me with two, three, four more years, but if he does, I know it’s going to stop. So why not have a blast? Why not get the most out of it? Why not laugh?
“Have fun, get great experiences because the early years weren’t like that. You’re trying to move up the ladder; you’re trying to accomplish certain things for the collective — for the team, yourself. I don’t have to move up the ladder. I don’t have to look for another job. I don’t have any dreams of coaching elsewhere, so it’s just fun. You have fun with your guys. It’s laughter, it’s all the great things. But I do know it’s coming to an end.”
Pitino is in just the second year of a six-year contract he signed with St. John’s, and he has already taken the Queens school’s program to heights unforeseen in 40 years. With a 30-4 record (18-2 Big East), Pitino steered the Red Storm to its first conference regular-season title since 1985 and its first Big East Tournament triumph in 25 years.
With it, St. John’s ended a six-year hiatus from the NCAA Tournament with a season that hearkened back to the golden age of the mid-1980s, when the program was graced by the legends of Carnesecca, Mullin, Berry, and Jackson.
It is a triumphant return to a power conference and the national stage for Pitino, a two-time national champion who was exiled from Louisville for cause after he was implicated in an FBI investigation that involved bribing recruits. He was later exonerated, but his national championship from 2013 was vacated.
He resurfaced in Greece, coaching Panathinaikos in the EuroLeague for three seasons (he won two Greek League titles and one Greek Cup) before returning to Iona of the mid-major Metro-Atlantic Athletic Conference. There, he led the Gaels to a pair of NCAA Tournaments.
“When I went away to Greece after getting fired — any time you’re fired, it’s a traumatic experience, but even more so what I went through — I felt a little betrayed in a lot of different areas,” Pitino said. “Then I took off for Greece by myself… I stopped hanging my head that night… and then I had the most wonderful two years from a learning experience of my life at 65… I look back on it and say, ‘There’s always a silver lining in every cloud.’ It rejuvenated me. It stopped me from being bitter. I said, let’s get on with it. It’s just adversity, and adversity; you can look square in the eye and piss all over it if you’re smart.
“Don’t hang your head. Pick yourself up, get on, and become the best EuroLeague coach you can possibly be; then, I came back and tried to be the best coach in the MAAC conference I could possibly be. It’s been fun. it’s been a blast.”
All of it has contributed to the gratitude Pitino exuded leading up to what will be his 24th NCAA Tournament appearance with his sixth-different program (Boston University, Providence, Kentucky, Louisville, Iona).
“I just revel in every single day of all of it,” Pitino said. “Being a part of the NCAA Tournament is what college basketball is all about…This is our month. This is what college basketball lives for: March.”
Omaha, or any other potential opponent in the next few weeks, should not expect a softer version of Pitino or St. John’s once the ball is tipped, though. This is a team that has one of the best defenses in the nation, ranks sixth in Division I in rebounding, and will take a fervent style of play to a completely new level.
“The intensity definitely has taken a jump,” star forward Kadary Richmond said of his head coach’s preparation tactics since winning the Big East Tournament on Saturday. “There’s no margin for error. We’ve been sharp with everything we’ve done this week.”
It is imperative to do so, considering St. John’s achieved a major goal in cutting down the nets at Madison Square Garden less than a week before their NCAA Tournament opener. But it is not a potential let-down that is worrying Pitino. It’s Omaha.
He was adamant in saying that their point guard, JJ White, who averaged 13.7 points and four assists per game this season, would be “a top-four point guard in the Big East,” and that power forward and Summit League Player of the Year Marquel Sutton was “a hell of a basketball player.’
“Our respect for Omaha is off the charts,” Pitino said. “They can really, really play. There were certain teams I’ve seen sometimes that I’ve seen in scouting that have a lot of weaknesses and that you could exploit. I don’t see that with this basketball team.”
And just like that, the thankful Pitino was stowed away for the next break in the action, whenever that might come. The St. John’s faithful will hope that will not be for a while.
“In order to get where we’d like to go, we have to improve,” Pitino said. “There’s a lot of great teams out there. In order to beat Omaha and to keep on moving on, we’re going to have to improve.”
