St. John’s Redstorm

Preaseason: The Fight for Respect

November 5, 2009 by Pico Dulce 3 Comments

Queue music: Aretha Franklin’s Respect (pop up audio)

Just 8 days until the season begins.

And if you’re reading this, you’re probably a serious St. John’s die-hard, or a serious damn masochist, or a bit of both. And it’s been tough to watch the men’s basketball team play at home or on the road. The Redmen/ Red Storm/ Johnnies have not provided that winning basketball that the fans and students want to see. The players have stayed clear of scandal and represent the school well – no pot smoking or woman beating, and the players are progressing academically. But this is the Big East. The students, fans, and alums want to see winning. Because those W’s? They bring in fans, recruits, publicity, and respect. And they reward the long-suffering fans for their patience and faith.

And apparently, the administration also wants to see winning ball, according to the New York Post:

“The parameters of [Coach Norm Roberts’] contract, which initially weighted heavily his player’s academic and conduct performances, now also demand greater success on the court.”

Certainly, some of the long-suffering fans will go off on rants about “accountability”, and they are free to let loose with those rants. But is that bit of news a reason to believe that there is some kind of win threshold? We’ll find out, perhaps, at the end of the season… if things go awry.

Then again, while the conference’s coaches pick St. John’s to finish 11th, and others inexplicably have St. John’s at 15th, others see what I see – a lot of returning minutes and consistency of roles in a league that’s in flux. Returning minutes tend to mean improvement in most cases.

But how much improvement? The difference between St. John’s and their opponents in conference was about 12 points per 100 possessions. Put more plainly, the Red Storm scored nearly 8 points less than their opponents in any given conference contest. Adjusting for 6 wins, that’s a number of blowouts. (If you want to read more about last year, here is a 2008-2009 review post to help you brush up).

How can that change?

Offensive Turnovers. They need to stop. Whether they are turnovers on ill-advised drives, the shaky ballhandling by guards or the lack of awareness/ hand strength in the post, those turnovers have to be cut down. This is probably the best chance for the Red Storm to move up in the Big East hierarchy, by not giving the ball away (and giving up easy scores afterwards).
Defensive Turnovers. The team is not big (except for Dele Coker). The defense has been on a downward trend, especially in conference, allowing opponents to shoot a higher effective field goal percentage each year since 2006. If the team can’t stop opponents from scoring, they can at least reduce the other team’s opportunities to score. Coach Roberts speaks about increased defensive intensity; hopefully a tough, harassing, ball-snatching perimeter defense will materialize.*
Scoring Droughts. Keeping the ball means having a chance to score; but not enough of the players on the floor have been efficient at scoring. With the addition of a scoring JUCO (Dwight Hardy) and an athletic JUCO (Justin Brownlee), plus a creative freshman guard (Omari Lawrence), and hopeful improvements from the returning guards, this could be a thing of the past. That is dependent, of course, on holding on to the ball long enough to squeeze a quality shot off.
Reliable Post Play. Down the stretch, DJ Kennedy and Paris Horne carried the team in victories and defeats. But Justin Burrell had some nice moments against Georgetown, and Sean Evans was a horse against Richmond. If they can be constant threats, and if Dele Coker can stay on the floor to provide a defense-first big who rebounds (and supplements the turnovers with some blocked shots), the team will be much less predictable on both ends.

Coming in this week: Notes on the season. Player notes. And the preview of the first official game, against Long Island University‘s Blackbirds.

*Yes, ball-snatching is a reference to that Malik Boothe photo in the Boston College game.

Peter a/k/a Pico writes for the East Coast Bias and the Church of Bracketology. He’ll be doing the Calm Before the Storm posts, just like last year.

Melsahn Basabe Commits to Siena

November 3, 2009 by Dave Krupinski Leave a Comment

Melsahn Basabe gave a verbal commitment to Siena’s Fran McCaffery today according to ESPN On the Trail.

This is a solid get for the Saints who dip into the New York talent pool. Our friends over at SienaSaintsblog.com should be pretty excited to land the big man. For more information regarding his commitment please visit there and while you’re there talk some smack about our bus trip for our matchup on November 27th. They know we’re coming for them!

STJ Media Day to Air Live

November 3, 2009 by Dave Krupinski Leave a Comment

Redstormsports.com reports that

“St. John’s will hold its annual Media Day for the Red Storm men’s and women’s basketball teams on Tuesday, Nov. 3, beginning at approximately 3 p.m. at the newly-renovated Carnesecca Arena. Approximately 50 members of the media have been credentialed for the event, and, for the first time ever, Red Storm supporters are too – thanks to StormTracker All-Access live streaming video on RedStormSports.com.

StormTracker All-Access is the official streaming video platform of St. John’s Athletics, providing live video for more than 100 sports events on campus each year, and producing more than 150 on-demand video features as well. StormTracker All-Access commentators Ralph Bednarczyk and Greg Rice will take fans behind the scenes Tuesday with live coverage from the floor of Carnesecca Arena during media day activities.

At approximately 3 p.m., St. John’s coaches Norm Roberts and Kim Barnes Arico will address the media on the court in a press conference format, and the coaches and all men’s and women’s basketball student-athletes will be available for interview sessions from approximately 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. The coaches and many of St. John’s men’s and women’s basketball players will join the All-Access commentators on-set for interviews.

The tentative Media Day schedule is as follows:

2009 St. John’s Basketball Media Day – Tuesday, Nov. 3 – Carnesecca Arena

3:00 p.m. – Head Coaches’ Press Conferences
3:30 p.m. – Interview Session I
4:00 p.m. – Interview Session II
4:30 p.m. – Media Day Ends”

You can catch all the action on Storm Tracker All-Access.

Myles Davis Visits St. John's

November 2, 2009 by Dave Krupinski Leave a Comment

As most of you know St. John’s had two publicized visitors on campus this weekend from the 2010 recruiting class in JJ Moore (unofficial) and Ron Roberts (official) but what no one knew about was Myles Davis also stopped by campus to check it out.

Davis, a member of the 2011 class, plays both his high school and AAU basketball with Ron Roberts. It was nice to see the coaching staff take advantage of a great opportunity to get both of the young men on campus at the same time.

Billy Singleton, Director of Basketball Operations, took Davis for a walk-thru the campus showing him all the facilities while practice was being held in Taffner Saturday afternoon.

Davis has been unavailable for comment so far but we’ll cut him some slack considering today is his birthday.

Devon Collier is Close to Choosing

November 1, 2009 by Dave Krupinski Leave a Comment

Many fans were beginning to think no news was bad news regarding Devon Collier’s Official Visit to St. John’s.

Kimani Young, Director of New Heights, said of Collier’s visit, “He had a great visit at St. John’s. He really enjoyed the guys and his dad spent a lot of time with him on the visit so he had a great time also. So we got to see what happens. They did a great job recruiting him.” Young also said he expects Collier to make a decision over the next couple of weeks.

Hopefully St. John’s did do a great job because Collier is a real player. Every time that New Heights needed an extra possession, Collier was right at the glass cleaning up. I didn’t keep count but he must have had 6 offensive rebounds. He missed a couple of put backs in the first half and I prematurely tweeted that he was pulling a Moses Malone because in the 2nd half when the game was tight Collier cleaned up every miss for a put back two. Collier finished with 25 points and 15 of those came in the 2nd half.

He showed great instinct for knowing how the ball was going to come off the rim and thats something you can’t teach most guys. When he got the ball it never came down and he went right back up with it. You could tell he was from good basketball pedigree. However Collier will need to add size to his frame before he is impact ready for the Big East.

As for what Collier thinks, “My visit at St. John’s was good. I had a really good experience, I didn’t expect the campus to be that nice. I visited the dorms and they just put new dorms up.” He thought it was really cool everyone on the team in the dorms and town houses.” He is looking for the total college experience from the team, academics, and campus life. “Its everything, they got to have everything for me to go.”

He also visited Seton Hall this past week and he enjoyed his time there as well. He got to see an exhibition scrimmage and came away impressed with the campus facilities there as well. Collier finished saying, “It’s going to be a hard decision for me to pick which school I want to go to.”

« Previous Page