And so another season in the books, it being early March before Selection Sunday, on which Sunday St John’s fans will anxiously await the announcement of the NIT bracket, because another SJU season is well over. Welcome to the autopsy.
As have been most St John’s years since around 1990 this one was a failure; frustrated fans will question the absence of the word “abject” preceding failure in that sentence; and the histrionics among you will call it humiliating rather than abject. But longtime fans know that as humiliations go this one was lesser than countless others SJU has endured through the decades.
SJU entered the season on the come (wait for it), returning the presumptive BE player of the year Julian Champagnie, freshman of the year turned sophomore Posh Alexander, and reigning Coach of the Year Iron Mike Anderson. Preseason it seemed like this just might be the year that wait till next year bums came true, finally justifying the annual October delusions of the ignorant fans who inhabit the internet sewer known as redmandotcom (RDC). Instead, SJU left the season having been cummed on. (And there’s the pay-off: entered on the come, left cummed on. Your welcum.) I’d have said butkaked but besides ruining the joke that would have befuddled the geriatrics at RDC: Paultzman would change his forum avatar to some oriental whore being showered in sperm and Paul would add a Japanese banner to the site and bloviating gasbag LawManFan (LMF) would write a tight 7000 words on why Mikes Anderson and Cragg are just the right guys to lead the program through vesuvian fountains of jizm and then stupid would pile upon stupider and even stupider until the thread was locked by some drama-queen moderator for being off-topic relative to posts about the nuanced virtues of various Suffolk County fine dining restaurants that put Miracle Whip on lobster. And we wouldn’t want that.
<Interlude the first>
You have to hand it to the redmandot dumbers. They’re currently in the midst of a three-month 1700 post thread trying to determine whether Mike Anderson – 22-33 in conference, no post season appearances after three years – is “the guy.” Note to those dopes: he’s not. Here for example is the aforementioned gaseous blowhard LawManFan’s take from a couple of months ago:
I am completely satisfied that the program is in the best hands it has been in for over 20 years with A.D. Cragg and Coach Anderson… It seems to me that this staff has a clear idea of how they want to build the program and how each season fits into that plan [and] Anderson seems to have a clear vision of what sort of players he wants to add to the program, how to develop them, and what sacrifices he needs to make to [bring] in players with fewer stars next to their name and [turn] them into studs in Year 2 or 3.
Did you get that? Mike Anderson has a “clear vision” of the “sacrifices” he needs to make to “bring in players with fewer stars,” which strategy encompasses a seventh-place year three finish as an integral part of a plan carefully crafted to people St John’s with burgeoning 2-star studs who will return SJU to its rightful place in the college basketball landscape.
The stupid, it burns.
Even when slapped in the face by reality – the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist as the kids say – poor LMF still doesn’t get it. Here’s him now:
The story of the season is that the team just didn’t have quite enough to get over the hump… Team wound up with a whole lot of close losses because it just didn’t have quite enough to get over the hump… Hopefully next season will offer a more well-rounded roster that will get over the hump
TLDR: this team “just didn’t have quite enough to get over the hump… just didn’t have quite enough to get over the hump.”
But why belabor this. Me, I’m gonna go get the papers, get the papers.
</interlude the first>
Speaking of Miracle Whip, this year SJU feasted on preseason cupcakes (albeit some of the gnosh comprising bitten nails), beat two teams it wasn’t expected to – Seton Hall fresh off losing its best player and a Xavier team in the midst of its usual end of season collapse – and otherwise sucked, losing several it should have won in comical fashion, including a humiliating loss to Pitt, which Pitt is the same Pitt coached by the same Jeff Capel who assured shovel-faced hack AD Mike Cragg that hiring the then recently-fired Mike Anderson was a “homerun,” the obvious question being a homerun for which, Pitt or Saint John’s. All of which culminating in a last second loss in the BE tournament to Villanova, in a game in which St John’s blew a 17-point second-half lead on their world’s most famous arena, purportedly their home court.
TLDR: this year SJU beat no one of consequence and lost to everyone of consequence.
I’d like to say that I can’t imagine the disappointment that St John’s fans feel after this season, but I can, having until recently been one. I can absolutely understand your disappointment. Which makes my delight in your suffering even more so, empathy being a whole other matter.
Instead of your fanboi distress consider my anti-fan elation: having grown finally to hate SJU I actively root for them to lose every game where the team flight hasn’t plowed into a mountain, which conflagration would leave me erect. This year SJU squeaked by various preseason patsies – scheduled to preserve Iron Mike’s sole accomplishment, his precious he’s never had a losing season streak, which shut up, nobody cares – lost to every out of conference major team it played (Kansas, Indiana and Pitt) and stunk in conference (thank god for Georgetown amirite? shout out to Butler), losing winnable games in every absurd which way imaginable. For us haters – and we are st john’s legion – this season couldn’t have been sweeter. Add to that fructuous mix Mike Schrewshrenski’s exit from Cameron over the weekend past and this might be the most enjoyable CBB season I’ve experienced since Marcus Hatten last passed a drug test. Because this year – much as I predicted – Saint John’s was an abomination, nightly ill-prepared and awful. They can’t shoot – from the floor, from the free throw line or from three – they don’t rebound, and their half-court games both defensive and offensive are laughable. And all of this landing firmly on the womanly shoulders of Mike “Home Run” Anderson, whose complete lack of strategic and situational awareness belies a peculiar misunderstanding of the rudiments of basketball, a sport he purports to coach.
TLDR: Mike Anderson stinks – he’s a hack strategist with a fugazi system designed to not get the best out of his mediocre recruits – and St John’s will stink for as long as he’s coach.
Speaking of awful recruiting, imagine you’re a coddled five-star teenage athlete with dreams of playing in the NBA and Mike Anderson and his nephew or whoever that guy who sits next to him on the bench is come to your house to try to convince you and your handlers that the road to Springfield starts with playing in a no-trick pony system that emphasizes a full-court helter-skelter defense that no one above middle-school AAU plays, which is one that doesn’t flatter your talent, or your skills, or your ambition. Look what I did for Julian Champagnie MA could say: I took him from a near-certain second round NBA pick with a guaranteed contract and coached him up into the Croatian lottery. Question: who’s going to sign up for that? Answer: Montez Mathis. Everyone else is going to Seton Hall.
Because Mike Anderson’s system isn’t designed to benefit his players, it’s designed to flatter Mike Anderson: when St John’s wins a game it’s because of Mike’s skillful implementation of 40-minutes of hell and when SJ loses it’s because his players didn’t want it enough or get after it enough and ended up leaving something out on the floor. Either that or it was the refs fault or the sun was shining in Iron Mike’s eyes. The other day he said after an eight point loss that “the free throw [was] the big difference” in a game with a six free throw differential where his players missed six free throws. I’d say you couldn’t make this guy up but it turns out you wouldn’t have to.
<interlude the second>
One of the things the no-hopers at RDC often have recourse to when discussing Iron Mike’s evident to everyone but his ball-washers flaws is his character: he is, they say, “classy.” Leave aside that those mutts wouldn’t recognize class if a class of classicists held a master class on The Theory of the Leisure Class in their colons. (And note that as I usually caution, if someone from RDC mentions “class” in your presence you should check to make sure you still have both your kidneys.) Pardon me, but what exactly is classy about Mike Anderson? Is it the way he blames everyone else for his failures? Is it the way he dog-houses kids and buries them on the bench? Is it his extensive collection of sweat clothes? I mean, I could spend pages describing Mike Anderson and the word “classy” wouldn’t occur to me. But then, I have a pretty extensive vocabulary.
</interlude the second>
I read on Twitter some fan talking about St John’s being a sleeping giant needing only Rick Pitino to awaken it, this being a sentiment often heard among delusional St John’s followers. Me, if I’m Rick Pitino – and who’s to say I’m not – the crowning achievement of my career would be telling St John’s to go fuck itself when it comes hat in hand begging me to resurrect its moribund program. I mean sure, Pitino seems like a guy who’s not adverse to sloppy seconds or even thirds, but even he must have some sort of minimal standards.) Newsflash to those dopes: St John’s is not a sleeping giant. St John’s is a fat bald old man in a red and white sweater lying in a hospital bed with a DNR tag hanging from his toe. And @MikeCraggSJU is Dr. Kevorkian.
Imagine being Cragg and having to make the first important decision of your career – which career up to then consisted of saying yes Coach Khrewshrensy, of course Coach Shreshewski, what ever you say Coach Khrytsrenski – and after whiffing first on the wrong Hurley and then on a Midwest mediocrity Christian name Porter you ask for advice CBA-lifer turned coaching failure Jeff Capel, merely because he’s Coach K adjacent and K’s letting your calls go to voicemail. And worse then you take it, leading to Mike Anderson, aka Coach Third Choice (CTC, ©). And then worser you double down on stupid in the second most important decision of your career and extend CTC until 2026, that’d be the same CTC who’s won .40 of his BE games at St John’s. Which is carry the one one win in ten better than the universally reviled Norm Roberts achieved, who carry the one has three times as many final four rings as Lou Carnesescca.
For Cragg to fire Anderson at this point – and Anderson needs to go, his shitiosity is evident to anyone with four functioning sense of five – he’d have to admit to the sort of incompetence that renders him unfit for the first real job he’s had in his adult life. He’d have to resign in disgrace and that’s not happening: bunglers like Cragg don’t fall on their swords, if they did they’d never have gotten to where they’re at. Instead he’ll invest in diversity training and trans-inclusive initiatives and tweet about the girls fencing team and do anything else to distract from the fact that he’s failed at his only real job, which was to return to excellence to the flagship program of a failing commuter university in a crumbling suburb of dying city.
Exit question re Cragg: does anyone believe he was more disappointed by St John’s season-ending losses to Marquette and Villanova than he was by Coach K losing the final home game of his career, and to North Carolina no less. Which event do you think moved Mike Cragg more: seeing Screwskrekci weeping like a big girl’s blouse upon entering Cameron for the last time in front of an emotional crowd comprising his former players aka a herd of NBA draft busts or watching Julian Champagnie and Posh Alexander and Aaron Wheeler play their last games in St John’s uniforms. (And what stupid uniforms the new uniforms are – I don’t doubt that Cragg called Cherokee Parks for advice on the design.) Because I know which way I’m leaning. And it’s not south.
<interlude the third, comprising random LMF stories>
1. LMF once announced that he was going to be coaching a team of middle schoolers and among the five things he was going to make sure they learned was the 2-3 zone. I opined that if he was going to be teaching young people basketball – a subject about which he knows fuck-all – the first thing he should teach them was how to lose gracefully. That comment was deleted by a moderator, presumably because I was being a meanie acting without class. I suspect the moderator was LMF, but the site has about as many moderators as it has regular posters, so it’s hard to be sure. My current favorite is the guy who sits with his finger hovering over the button so he can lock the game thread just as the buzzer sounds. Because RDC is a fetid cesspool, sure, but at least it’s neat.
2. A couple of years ago during the off-season LMF created March Madness type bracket on RDC that pitted poster against poster in a contest relative to their rhetorical skills and basketball knowledge. Your humble narrator went out in the first round. (Which perhaps explains my bitterness.) Whereas LMF, being a modest sort, had himself losing a tough one in the semi-finals to the eventual champion. Poor LMF: he just couldn’t get over the hump, get over the hump.
</interlude the third, comprising random LMF stories>
Tradition dictates that at this point in the post-mortum we grade the players, but who cares, none of them were very good and I doubt that between graduation and attrition any of them will be here next year anyway. Still:
Julian Champagnie seems like a nice kid – some might say classy – but last night’s airball with the game on the line epitomizes his career. He reminds me of no one so much as Kyle Cuffe, albeit softer. He’s the poster boy for players who came back for one more year when taking the money that was on the table was a much better option. Good luck in Serbia. Soriano is softer than Champagnie. (I bet you wouldn’t say that to his face, internet tough guy. No, I wouldn’t, he’s enormous. Doesn’t make me wrong though.) I like Wusu, he’s a good kid, but he’s crazy, he’s a cowboy, he’s got too much to prove. You gotta watch out for kids like this. (Prediction: Wusu has a Dom Pointer-esque senior year.) Montez Mathis is charitably described as a liability. And other than Wheeler the bench of misfit toys is so bad that Anderson’s scared to put them in the game. Posh I love, how can you not, but he’s always hurt and he’s always going to be hurt because of his size and the way he plays. I wouldn’t be surprised if he enter the portal and you shouldn’t be either. Although maybe he comes back, maybe he likes being a 2-guard who comes off the bench, who knows.
TLDR: to the extent that St John’s has “studs” they’re leaving and next year the rebuild starts once again.
And so that’s that. Another failed basketball season and all that’s left to look forward to now is the Triple Crown, after which the great sports desert looms. As I always say at this juncture: here’s to the losers. See you in the funny papers.