St. Johns gets exactly what it wants from defense, bench in final tune-up

Rick Pitino got exactly what he wanted out of his team in the final tune-up game before St.John’s opens its season against Fordham in just over a week. After getting caught in an offensive slugfest against Rutgers in the Johnnies’ first exhibition game of the year, Pitino’s squad held the Towson Tigers to 46 points in a 64-46 victory at Carnesecca Arena on Saturday.While the final score seemed somewhat inconsequential to Pitino, who’s entering his second year at the helm for St.

John’s, the legendary coach has been prioritizing defense heading into the 2024-25 season.The Red Storm struggled out of the gate last year on the defensive end of the ball, and it’s been a focus of Pitino’s this year to keep it from happening again. The purpose for Pitino, in scheduling a team like Towson, was to address that very issue.“We played really great defense and that’s what we wanted to get out of this game,” Pitino said.

“We’ve been working about 75 percent of our practices just with man defense.One of the reasons we were ready last year at the beginning of the year is we weren’t very good defensively.

We learned a valuable lesson and came away with a valuable defensive performance.” St.John’s stifled Towson offensively for a better part of the game, holding the Tigers to 28.8 percent shooting from the floor through the 40-minute affair and putting up 26 points off turnovers alone. The Red Storm blocked eight shots and stole the ball 13 times in the win, while holding them to 21.7 percent shooting from beyond the 3-point line.“We locked in on defense and got the stops needed,” said Aaron Scott, who finished with a team-high 11 points. Pitino compared the lessons from Saturday afternoon’s game in Queens to a game he coached during the Final Four in 2013, when Louisville faced Wichita State for a trip to the national title game.

The current St.John’s coach described how Louisville had to be the better team defensively in order to adva...