Don’t pull the plug just yet on St. John’s season.
The Johnnies showed there is still plenty of fight left in them.
For a change, St. John’s finished on Sunday.
It closed out a quality opponent. It gave its fans something to celebrate, a reason to believe in the team making one last push for the NCAA Tournament. There was no collapse in the second half.
Instead, there was a team that raced out to a big lead and finished off an elite opponent, knocking off No. 15 Creighton, 80-66, at a rocking Garden for the first signature victory of the Rick Pitino era.
It was tenuous late, before Jordan Dingle and Daniss Jenkins took over, scoring all 15 points in a game-clinching 15-4 run that turned a five-point lead into a 16-point bulge.
Dingle started it with a pair of short jumpers and Jenkins closed it with nine consecutive points. By the end of the run, MSG was as loud as it has been all year for St. John’s.
“This was the best game of the season by far,” Jenkins said. “It’s really hard when the season is going like [it was], to stay with it like this. You hear all the negativity, and, ‘Oh we’re not going to make the tournament’ and things like that. It’s really easy to go the other way.
“We’re really just proud of each other that we came out and had that mindset. We were saying, basically, it’s a pride game, we got to stand up, show what we’re made of, show our true character. It was really fun to see that.”
After dropping eight of 10 games, the Johnnies (16-12, 8-9 Big East) have won two in a row and could win out, with Butler, DePaul and Georgetown left on the schedule. That’s what it will take for them to get back into the at-large conversation.
“There was no doubt in our heads we were going to win this game,” Glenn Taylor Jr. said. “We just got to continue to do that, stack games, and who knows where we can go.”
It remains a long shot, but there is hope after a defensive effort few could’ve seen coming.
St. John’s held Creighton, which was coming off a rout of No. 1 Connecticut, to 23 percent from 3-point range. It shut down star wing Baylor Scheierman (12 points on 4-for-16 shooting) and point guard Steven Ashworth (nine points on 3-for-9 shooting).
Jenkins was brilliant, notching a season-high 27 points, six assists, two steals and two blocks and Dingle added 18 points. Taylor, who had seen his role reduced, turned in his best game of the year with 10 rebounds, six assists and air-tight defense.
“We don’t have Glenn Taylor, we don’t win the game,” Jenkins said. “I told him, that’s the Glenn I know, that’s the GT we see every day in practice. We were playing with [great] effort, probably ignited by GT playing the way he was playing.”
St. John’s attacked when the game was in the balance, pushing the ball even after Creighton (20-8, 11-6) made shots. It didn’t get tight. It played to win rather than not to lose.
15 Creighton on Sunday. Jason Szenes for the NY Post
Jenkins said he never even looked at the scoreboard. The result was the Johnnies winning a game they have lost several times this season.
“We kept trying to push it and win the game, not be afraid to lose the game,” Pitino said.
The first half followed a familiar pattern. St. John’s started well, and built a sizable lead. It raced out to a 10-point edge just seven minutes in and closed the half on a 17-3 lead, taking a 13-point advantage into the break.
It was just a five-point game at the under-eight timeout behind Creighton’s Trey Alexander’s 11 second-half points to that point. The Johnnies had been there before, unable to close out wins over the likes of UConn, Marquette, Creighton and Dayton.
This would be different. Dingle and Jenkins took over from there. St. John’s finally found a way to close out a big game.
“It’s about time,” Dingle said. “We had too many we gave away.”
