When the college basketball season is barely into December, it's often too soon to conclude that a team is going to be a major disappointment from just its early results. No. 6 Duke proved that last night with a blowout win over No. 5 Michigan State, as the Blue Devils recovered from a Saturday loss to then-unranked Purdue. After missing out on a chance to be the top-ranked squad in the nation, the Blue Devils are on the upswing for their next game, a Saturday afternoon contest against St. John's at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
"We're trying to find out who we are. We found out a little bit who we are [against Michigan State]," said sophomore guard Daniel Ewing, who chipped in with nine points and two steals in East Lansing, Mich. "We want to carry this over to St. John's and just keep building off our solid night."
The building for the Red Storm, meanwhile, is crumbling fast. Not even a year after head coach Mike Jarvis' team upset Duke by a point at Madison Square Garden, not much could go worse for the Red Storm, and it might not be too premature to count out a fading star from a bunch of former New York City slickers.
At 1-3, St. John's is off to its worst start since the 1947-48 season, having lost to Fairfield last week and, most recently, suffering an embarrassing 17-point defeat at the hands of Hofstra Tuesday. The loss marked a career low-point for Jarvis, once considered among the nation's top head coaches after leading his new team to the Elite Eight in 1999 and finishing 53-17 in his first two seasons in Jamaica, N.Y.
"I'm a very disappointed man," Jarvis said after Tuesday's falter, the worst in 40 years at Red Storm home court Alumni Hall.
"I can't use the words that I would like to describe the performance, or the lack of, tonight," he continued. "It wasn't very good--it was awful. It was awful."
But the bricks don't stop there. The team's off-the-court problems popped up again last week, when junior guard Willie Shaw was caught smoking marijuana on a Queens street corner with former St. John's guard Marcus Hatten, who had 29 points and hit the game-winning shot against the Blue Devils this March. The incident, which resulted in Shaw's indefinite suspension, comes after senior forward Grady Reynolds, who has been the Red Storm's best player this season, was arrested for assaulting a female swimmer last year.
With the Johnnies on more than just a downswing, then, St. John's president Donald Harrington has taken in calls from concerned alumni and consistent booing from the Red Storm faithful. Even before the Hofstra debacle, at a press conference announcing the beginning of construction for a new practice facility for the team no less, Harrington all but called out Jarvis, whose head is being hunted in the Big Apple.
It was there that Duke let last season's match-up slip away, squandering an 11-point lead in the last four minutes of the game at the hands of Hatten and bruising forward Anthony Glover.
"At a time when it seemed like everybody was counting us out and not thinking we could stay within 15 points of this team, we stuck together," Hatten said after the game.
But now Hatten and Glover are both gone, and so too are former stars Omar Cook, Ron Artest and Felipe Lopez--long gone, for a team very much falling apart.
What St. John's does have left in the tank is Reynolds and sophomore guard Elijah Ingram, the team's two leading scorers with 16.5 and 12.8 points per game, respectively. Reynolds, who managed 22 points Tuesday despite still recovering from a sprained ankle, has transformed from a reliable bench player to Jarvis' stalwart in the post. Ingram, in the meantime, sniped six three-pointers against Hofstra. But there is a significant drop-off from there; Jarvis has been tinkering with his lineup, and forward Kyle Cuffe is the only other consistent starter for a team that has been struggling on the defensive end.
That can't bode well for St. John's either, especially after the Blue Devils spread the wealth last night with four players scoring in double figures and two new starters--Shavlik Randolph and Sean Dockery--entering into the mix, as Duke was in-synch offensively for an entire 40 minutes for the first time all season, head coach Mike Krzyzewski said.
"It gives us confidence," Randolph said of last night's win. "We're going to come out against St. John's with a positive outlook, regardless if we won or lost [last night]--that's just the way we play. But it feels good to get it going after a win out there. You just can't let up."
With that regained confidence from the Blue Devils, St. John's might just have to keep praying for mercy this weekend.
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