It’s safe to say that Rick Pitino’s first season with the St. John’s Red Storm is not going the way he had hoped as the team has now lost eight of their last 10 games, leading to the two-time national champion head coach to absolutely blast his own team in the postgame press conference.
After the game, Rick Pitino absolutely blasted his own team, saying that this season “has been the most unenjoyable experience I’ve had since I’ve been coaching.”
“If I said I was disappointed, that would be the understatement of the year,” he said. “Our lateral quickness and our toughness is just something I’ve never witnessed in all my years of coaching.
“We are so nonathletic that we can’t guard anybody without fouling. … And really it’s not about losing. Even winning, when I watch the film, I see unathletic plays, I see people that don’t handle the ball, that are just interested in taking quick shots. It’s been a disappointing year.”
Of course, a fair rebuttal to this criticism is the fact that Pitino assembled this roster and chose these players himself, adding 10 transfer players and two highly-rated transfer players. But he claims that all of those players were added by necessity, saying “We just could take who we could get.”
“I had no choice,” he said. “We just could take who we could get, who was available, we had no choice. I don’t think we were going to win the first year anyway, because when you rush like that, you don’t see the players. Not a whole lot we can do.”
We’ll have to see whether or not the team can turn things around down the stretch.
[ESPN]
