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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — For as satisfying as St. John’s resurrection has felt, the ending verse was about as empty as imaginable. Of all the ways to go out. An impossibly bad offensive performance. An inability to get the final defensive stops. A second-round NCAA Tournament loss to an Arkansas team that barely made the field.
Not only that but a decision that will follow Rick Pitino and St. John’s for a long time. Probably for however long it takes to get back here and advance.
Four minutes and 56 seconds. That’s how long the 2025 Big East Player of the Year sat as St. John’s tried to steal a spot in the Sweet 16. Pitino pulled star wing RJ Luis out of the lineup after making two free throws to cut Arkansas’ lead to two points with less than five minutes to play. Luis, who finished his junior season as the first St. John’s player to average more than 18 points and seven rebounds in nearly 30 years, was replaced by Rubén Prey, a freshman from Portugal averaging 7.6 minutes per game.
There Luis sat. Only the third player in program history to be named the conference’s player of the year, he was the Johnnies’ leading scorer in 17 of 34 games before Saturday. He sat and watched the season end.
Among the harshest realities of a 75-66 loss was Pitino’s deeming Luis unplayable down the stretch of a win-or-go-home matchup. In a physical game against an Arkansas team with size, length and athleticism, Luis toiled through a 3-for-17 shooting performance that made an already offensively challenged St. John’s team completely inept. Luis carried the disposition of a player living and feeling every second of the worst game of his life with a long face and sad eyes at all times. St. John’s players continually approached Luis throughout the afternoon, consoling him and imploring him to figure it out.
He never did, and an end scenario played out that no one could’ve fathomed.
Pitino did everything possible not to say the hard part out loud. Asked about benching Luis, he responded: “He played 30 minutes. That’s a long time.”
A follow-up came. Was he tired?
“No. He played 30 minutes. I played other people. You know the answer, Roger,” he said to Newsday’s Roger Rubin, who has known Pitino for the better part of 20 years. “You’re asking leading questions. So don’t ask me any questions. You already know why he didn’t play.”
But some will wonder. What if Luis could have found something, anything in Saturday’s waning minutes? The whole St. John’s team struggled Saturday, for the most part, not only Luis. Maybe it’s worth sticking with the player who got the team here.
“You know, he was 3 for 17,” Pitino said when he was asked again about Luis from another voice. “You know he was 0 for 3 (on 3s). So you’re answering your own (question). I’m not going to knock one of my players.”
It was a fitting end to a frustrating day.
“I mean, of course, everybody wants to play when it comes down to it,” Luis said sitting in front of his locker. “So, I mean, just for me not to be able to be on the court the last couple minutes, just help my team win, hurt me.”
Credit Arkansas for the win, as Pitino did repeatedly Saturday, but this was a loss that resides in the mirror.
Pitino’s team survived all season in caveman fashion — hostile defense, bruising physicality and rip-it-off-the-rim offensive rebounding. The recipe regularly produced more shot attempts than their opponents. Those attempts, in turn, produced more points than their opponents. It was good enough for a 27-4 regular season and fresh-cut nets for a Big East regular-season title and a Big East tournament championship.
But St. John’s style masked some hard realities. Pitino’s team ranks 340th in the country in 3-point shooting (30.1) and 342nd in points produced off 3s. It ranked seventh overall in offense — among the 11 teams in the Big East.
That’s hard living in the modern game, and St. John’s got away with it via patchwork midrange shots and scoring at the rim. It’s no surprise that an Arkansas team comprised of long arms and legs was the Johnnies’ undoing. It’s hard to score when your players can’t see. While everyone points to Saturday’s 2-for-22 shooting from beyond the arc, the Johnnies also went 13-for-47 on 2-point shots that weren’t dunks.
That’s how the impossible happens, and to be clear, it is borderline impossible to lose a game when finishing with 28 offensive rebounds, only six turnovers and taking 12 more shots than the opponent.
“I hate to see them go out this way,” Pitino said with blank eyes. “We were championship-driven in our minds, but I have been disappointed before with this. You just hate to see us play like that. I don’t mind going out with a loss; I just hate to see us play that way offensively. You gotta live with it.”
The team also will have to live with an issue that surely will fester.
While this St. John’s team was great and pressed defibrillators upon the chest of a moribund program, was this team ever really a national title contender? Its offensive numbers never looked the part, and the Johnnies currently do not own a win over a Top-25 team in Kenpom’s rankings.
There’s a very good chance the Big East, as a whole, could be finished in the tournament come Sunday unless UConn can stun Florida. This likely will go down as one of the all-time down years in league history. So what does it mean to have dominated that league?
The answer probably depends on the vantage point.
What is without question is that the basketball revival at St. John’s carries more weight than one bad day in Rhode Island. Even with Pitino’s history as the game’s all-time turnaround artist, what occurred in Queens this season didn’t seem plausible. St. John’s averaged 15.3 wins per year and made only three NCAA Tournament appearances in the 20 years before Pitino’s arrival.
On Saturday, the Johnnies fell just short of posting a program-record 32nd win. They also fell short of the program’s first Sweet 16 since 1999.
That’s a long time.
(Top photo of Rick Pitino: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
