It isn’t important whether Kevin Willard’s words were true or not. Really, it isn’t. It’s what those sentiments reveal and what they illustrate that’s so meaningful, especially as we count down to one of the most intriguing area basketball games in years.
Willard’s Seton Hall Pirates had just held off Rutgers in the annual showdown between Jersey’s biggest basketball programs. He was asked a question. He answered it, honestly, which is his way. This is what he said:
“What I told the guys is that other than [Villanova], we’ve been the best college basketball program in the Northeast for the past five years — and it’s not even close.”
Well, Syracuse made the Final Four in that time frame. Connecticut won a national championship in that time frame. Heck, Buffalo has won twice as many NCAA Tournament games in the past five years, and so has Rhode Island. At last check, all those schools fall snugly within the Northeast.
But those are mere details. The gist of Willard’s point is absolutely accurate: The Pirates have become one of the most reliable teams in the country, and if we were to create a loose confederation of “metropolitan area” schools, then Seton Hall would reside on top of that mountain, virtually unchallenged.
Which is why Saturday night at Prudential Center promises to be one of the great college basketball events we’ve seen in that extended metro area in quite some time. St. John’s comes in with the sparkling 12-0 record — though its best wins were against ordinary teams with famous names like Georgia Tech (6-5) and Virginia Commonwealth (8-4), which explains why the Johnnies have yet to crack the Top 25.
Seton Hall, meanwhile, is 9-3 with two signature wins already (Kentucky, Maryland) and has won eight out of nine, the only blemish a five-point loss to Louisville.
There are tangible stakes in play here — it’s quite possible the winner will sneak into the polls for the first time all year (St. John’s was 28th this week, Seton Hall 33rd). But there is something else, too: These are schools that have been playing each other since the beginning of time, but there are only a handful of those games that could be considered meaningful or even remotely memorable.
You probably have to go back to March 14, 1953, in fact. That was the finals of the NIT, and the fourth-ranked Pirates of Walter Dukes and Richie Regan knocked off No. 20 St. John’s 58-46 in front of 18,496 — the biggest crowd ever to watch a college basketball game in New York to that point. Fittingly, Saturday’s game is an advance sell-out, and we don’t see a lot of those around here anymore for regular season college games.
The Johnnies have gotten a little feisty of late, waiting for the credit to catch up with their spotless record. From here on, of course, there is no need for self-promotion: The Big East will take care of that, with four games at the top — Seton Hall, Marquette, Georgetown, Villanova — that ought to give everyone a quick accounting of where they are and who they are.
“Well, Dec. 29, we play and we’ll be ready,” St. John’s coach Chris Mullin said after the Johnnies closed out the non-conference portion of their schedule (save for a February date at Duke) with a 104-82 win against Sacred Heart last week. “Everything that’s happened up until this point is in the past now. Everything we do is geared toward progression and improvement. But the Big East is always exciting.”
And it starts in their closest neighbor’s backyard, in Newark. Seton Hall is the king of the city game until someone knocks off their crown. Do the Johnnies have that in them?
“We have a chip on our shoulder,” St. John’s Marvin Clark II said after the Sacred Heart game, and it is a chip well earned. On Saturday night, they get to do something about it. On Saturday night, they get to put Willard’s words into the past tense.
