After beating Villanova today, the St. John’s Red Storm has victories over Georgetown, Notre Dame, Duke, UCONN, Pitt, and Villanova. They’ve risen from being an unranked team to being the #25 team in the country, and should continue to climb once the new rankings come out.
Shouldn’t they be higher? Like, much higher? I guess voters are reluctant to place a team with nine losses too high. To be fair, no team ranked ahead of them had lost as many games as of the time last week’s rankings came out.
Ok, fine. Don’t voters, though, look closely at the quality of the opponents? If so, didn’t they look at the Red Storm’s schedule and see that five of St. John’s losses came to teams consistently ranked within the top 25 this year — some even in the top ten: Notre Dame, Syracuse, Georgetown, Louisville, and St. Mary’s. Of those five teams, St. John’s avenged its loss against two of them: Notre Dame and Georgetown, splitting its season series with each of those teams.
It’s hard to imagine that a team from New York could be underrated, and it’s particularly hard to imagine that happening if it’s a Big East team from New York that has beaten Duke. Yet, that seems to be what’s happening.
Perhaps the Red Storm will shoot up the rankings this week, or earn a high seed in the NCAA tournament in spite of a relatively low ranking in the polls, and this will all be moot. For now, all that’s clear is that St. John’s is a force, and teams with championship aspirations should hope that they’re able to stay out of the path of this Storm for a long time.
How can you not address the Knicks’ defensive shortcomings? As you all saw last night, two All-Stars and a fabulous point guard weren’t enough to defeat the worst team in the league, which point up its fourth highest point total of the season against New York. Knicks coach Antoni (notice the absence of a D) is allergic to defense, as are all the teams he coaches. Knicks top priority needs to be one of those grizzly veterans who plays lockdown defense, not adding anymore stars.
Sippy! Nice to have you on board.
Regarding Antoni (I like that, by the way), I hear you that he doesn’t have a record of coaching good D. Four responses to that:
1. Antoni, for better or worse, is the coach of the Knicks right now. To try to win with Antoni as your coach, it makes no sense to construct a roster of players who are primarily focused on D. Now, whether or not Antoni SHOULD BE the Knicks coach, that’s a different discussion. The point is that he is, and one you put him in that spot, you’ve got to build your roster accordingly. Given that he’s the coach, the ‘Melo move makes lots of sense.
2. The Knicks now have a bunch of good defenders / rebounders: Fields, Turiaf, Balkman, Douglas, Brewer. That group at least brings SOME defensive toughness to the team. If Billups / Antony / Amar’e can do their thing on the offensive end (and they will), it’s a group good enough to win lots of games with.
3. I still don’t get what people think would have been a better option than making the deal. When I ask the question of people who didn’t like the deal, all I hear is that the Knicks should have “waited for free agency in 2012” to make their team better. But that’s a year and a half away. And, anyway, didn’t we already try the whole wait-and-hope-free-agents-come-make-us-a-championship-team thing? Haven’t we learned?
4. You’re really making judgments after two games? Two?