CHARLESTON, S.C. — This time, St. John’s didn’t run out of gas. This time, there wasn’t only a response, but a knockout punch. 

In Rick Pitino’s fifth game as the Johnnies’ coach, the team experts projected to be one of the better teams in the Big East began to show its potential. 

Ball movement was terrific. The defense stepped up in big moments. There was balanced scoring. Most of all, St. John’s looked like a team rather than a bunch of individuals. The result was a morale-boosting, 91-82 victory over Utah at TD Arena and an encouraging third-place finish in the Charleston Classic on Sunday night. 

“It’s only going to keep growing for all of us from here,” Jordan Dingle said. 

The Johnnies put the game away with a 16-5 run late in the second half, turning a six-point lead into a 17-point bulge. Fittingly, four different players scored in that run, and five different players reached double figures led by Daniss Jenkins’ 19 points and eight assists. 

Dingle, gaining confidence by the game, had 18 points and four assists. Chris Ledlum followed with 15 points and nine rebounds and Joel Soriano notched 12 points, 15 rebounds and two blocks, more than holding his own against Utah’s two 7-footers. Nahiem Alleyne, who was buried on the bench at the start of the tournament, scored 10 points and added three assists. Branden Carlson led Utah (3-2), which nearly upset sixth-ranked Houston on Friday, with 22 points. 

This was an impressive offensive display. St. John’s (3-2) shot 53 percent from the field, had 19 assists on 35 made field goals, made 13 of 26 3-point attempts while pushing pace and notched 16 points in transition. 

“I think they all took good shots. They pushed the pace. They didn’t let the pace get away,” Pitino said. “Will we [regularly] shoot 53 percent [from the field] and 50 percent from the 3? No. Will we get better defensively and run offense like we did tonight? Yes. That was a shooting display and these guys are responsible for that.” 

Said Utah coach Craig Smith: “They’re a good team. They’re getting better. You could see it from the first game of the tournament until today.” 

St. John’s showed resilience after another shaky start to the second half. Utah reeled off the first 11 points of the stanza to briefly go ahead, and it was feeling eerily similar to Friday’s loss to Dayton. The Johnnies went scoreless over the first 3:45 of the period. 

But Ledlum got them on the board with a driving layup, kick-starting a 19-6 run that included a highlight-reel Dingle dunk over multiple Utah players as the shot clock expired. 

“Tonight he showed what a great athlete he is.” Pitino said. “That wasn’t easy to do. My mouth was open.” 

Dingle followed that with a 3-pointer and Alleyne added a step-back triple to push the lead to six at the under-12 timeout. It was an 11-point game after Alleyne found Soriano for an alley-oop slam with less than 10 minutes to go. 

Utah made a few runs from there, but the lead was never really in danger. St. John’s always had an answer. In the final minutes, there were loud “Let’s go Johnnies” chants. In the fifth game of the season, the team everyone expected to see showed up. 

“The best thing about tonight is we finally played I would say closer to a complete game,” Dingle said. “We had energy the entire time. I gotta give credit to our fans who traveled this long way and took time out of their lives to come and support us. Their energy was amazing. I was really proud to see us playing so hard for 40 minutes.”