Rick Pitino conference:
http://www.courier-journal.com/section/videonetwork?bctid=61010482001Some of the St. John's related q and as:
Q. As a native New Yorker, what does it mean to have St. John's get back to the heights that they've had and restore that tradition for the rest of the Big East? As in, a lot of times, you want to see your marquee programs do well so everybody does well?
Well, it's not like the Knicks, you know, like the league always says we need the Knicks to be good because it's the mecca of professional basketball in terms of exposure and publicity, they want the Knicks to be good in Madison Square garden. It's not that way... because, you know, their home is Queens, and we don't need St. John's to be a marquee game to be a great conference... certainly now, St. John's wants to be one of the marquee games because of their great tradition. And they're certainly capable of doing that, and it's all about keeping the great players home. That's the bottom line. St. John's has always been great when they can keep the great players home. You know, the Walter Berrys, the Mark Jacksons, people like that.
Q. You think Roberts has maybe started to build that a little bit there?
I do. Norm's a very good basketball coach. He's a hard worker, he's a New York guy, he's a terrific person,. It's just... you knopw, the tough thing about building in the Big East, it's not like other places because even if you have a very good recruiting year, you may be still 6th or 7th in the Big East. When you get started, a normal - building a program is 3 to 4 years, a 3 to 5 year window. But in the Big East it takes longer because your competition's so much greater. So it's not about - in other programs, I always used to say when you get your first recruiting class into it's junior, senior year, you're gonna start to see the fruits of your labor. Well, in the Big East, that's not always the case. You know, it may be 2 to 3 recruiting classes before you see it, because it's just necessary, being competition's so keen. Because every year the Connecticuts and the Pittsburghs and the Syracuses are just reload and have great great talent down the road... hopefully we've arrived at that point.
Q. St. John's is also one of the programs in the preseason that everybody figured might make a greater leap to the upper echelon. Do you see them as doing that even though they've kinda started off rocky, like a South Florida, when they get their players in?
Yeah, I think - St. John's will be competitive against anyone. They've got athletes, they've got the defense, they've got the coaching, the system, to on any given night you could just see them - when they played Duke at Duke, it was a war most of the game. They're that way because they play great defense, and they have very good basketball players and athletes - they could be in any game. Now, so could Cincinnati, they turned the corner so can - was Gilchrist back the other night when South Florida played? I don't think so. When he comes back... So when he comes back, you know they played Notre Dame without Gilchrist to a one-point game, so they're gonna be much better. This league, to answer your question, I'm not sure how it's gonna, it doesn't matter being 0-2 or 2-0 right now. It's not gonna be last year. It's quite a feat we accomplished last year only having 2 losses in our conference last year, that's not gonna be it this year- teams gonna take some losses this year.