Throughout the course of its march back to respectability in the Big East, St. John’s came to rely on two numbers.
The first is 60, which is the name of a daily practice drill passed down from the special assistant Gene Keady, who inherited it from Eddie Sutton, who learned it from Hank Iba — a ball-control and passing exercise that rewards sound decisions and fundamentals. A point is awarded for each successful pass, 5 points for a layup, 5 points for every foul. There is no dribbling. First team to 60 points wins.
And the losing team runs 17s: sprints the width of the court, back-and-forth, 17 times in no more than 1 minute 2 seconds. If even one player fails to finish in time, the pattern is repeated, as many times as it takes to beat the clock.
“We’re in shape,” the senior guard D’Angelo Harrison said last week, with a wink.
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If it all sounds like training camp revisited, that is essentially the back-to-basics approach that Coach Steve Lavin and the Red Storm needed to take after losses in their first five Big East games. His team needed to retool, said Lavin, who made certain that happened by using a coach’s heavy touch: mindless drilling and endless sprinting.
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Orlando Sanchez of St. John’s shooting in an 82-60 victory over Georgetown on Sunday. Kathy Willens/Associated Press
The approach has certainly seemed to work: St. John’s battered Georgetown, 82-60, at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night to win its fifth consecutive game and eighth in its last nine.
It was a rapacious effort, thorough and unforgiving, and it stamped the Red Storm’s revival as a team that may be worthy of consideration for the N.C.A.A. tournament.
No Big East team has started 0-5 in the conference and made the N.C.A.A. tournament. This is a new Big East, of course, without some traditional mainstays: Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Louisville, to name a few. But the nature of the climb for the Red Storm (17-9, 7-6) remained daunting. The loss dropped the Hoyas, who had won four in a row, to 15-10, 6-7 in the Big East.
The last time these teams met, on Jan. 4, St. John’s trailed at halftime by 26 points. The Red Storm were shooting 21 percent. Their performance was barely in the realm of competitiveness.
“We kind of lost our way,” Lavin said last week.
Lavin looked around an ashen locker room during that game and sensed the players’ embarrassment. This was rock bottom, he told them. They lost the game by 17. They lost the next game as well. And then the next. And the next.
As the losses mounted, criticism of Lavin’s coaching and his ability to develop the team began to simmer. The Red Storm had not been to the N.C.A.A. tournament since 2011, Lavin’s first year, with a team he largely inherited. He had three stellar recruiting classes to put a winning team on the floor.
For various reasons, things just did not mesh. The freshman point guard, Rysheed Jordan, was suspended for one game and missed another to attend to a family matter. Lavin, who said there was a need for some humility on the team, doled it out in sweat-soaked practices, with the 60s and 17s drills.
“Everything we do now is so on point,” said Harrison, who, like Jordan, scored 24 points Sunday. “Everybody is locked in on each thing.”
Of the criticism, Lavin said he had learned well enough as a young coach at U.C.L.A. to handle the hot seat.
“I actually liked the fact that the media and the fans were engaged and that we had become relevant enough that there are actually expectations,” Lavin said Sunday. “We wanted to get the program to a level where people wanted us to win and they’d be salty when we didn’t. To me, it was a sign that we were a healthy program, that we had vitality.”
When St. John’s posted a 70-65 victory over Creighton, then No. 12, on Feb. 9, it seemed to be an affirmation of what the Red Storm players and coaching staff already knew: The light had been flipped on.
Entering Sunday, neither ESPN’s Joe Lunardi nor CBS’s Jerry Palm had St. John’s in his predicted field for the tournament. But there may be only a few teams around the country on a run like St. John’s. In the first half Sunday, the Red Storm shot 68 percent and committed only three turnovers.
After the game, Lavin was asked if he had come up with any affable nicknames for this group, like the “Redeem Team” of 2010-11. Lavin said no, then corrected himself.
“At one point, I was calling them ‘Angina pectoris,’ ” he said, referring to the medical term for chest pain. “They were the heartbreak kids, but right now they’re just playing great basketball.”