It was billed as a heavyweight fight, a matchup between the two best teams in the Big East Conference all season.
It was a technical knockout after just three minutes.
St. John’s did to UConn Saturday night the same thing it did to Providence and Seton Hall each of the two days prior, jumping on the Huskies by scoring the first ten points of the game and not letting up from there, cruising to a 72-52 victory that landed the Red Storm its second straight Big East tournament championship and fifth overall.
In many ways, it was a mirror image of St. John’s last loss, a one-sided, 72-40 thrashing at the hands of UConn on February 25 in Hartford. But the concept of retaliation was never brought up in the winning locker room, even if the Johnnies’ opening salvo felt as though it had settled any score that may have remained from that fateful night in Connecticut.
“We never mentioned revenge,” head coach Rick Pitino attested. “We just talked about championship. This is the championship. It doesn’t matter who we’re playing. It’s a championship, it’s another night to get better and improve. And we did.”
“They just really jumped us to start the game,” UConn head coach Dan Hurley conceded. “I think we knew that it would be a very forceful response from them, and we just weren’t able to match it, but credit St. John’s. They’ve got a team that’s built incredibly well to play in this conference here, and just the ultimate credit to them. They deserved it and we didn’t.”
A Zuby Ejiofor (6'9''-F) jumper 23 seconds into the contest opened the scoring for St. John’s as UConn struggled to handle the ball and keep up with the suffocating pressure the Red Storm placed on the Huskies in the opening minutes. Three turnovers and eight more points later, it was 10-0, and Hurley needed to call a timeout to quell the momentum and capacity crowd.
The Huskies fought uphill through much of the first half and into the second, and finally appeared to catch a break in the form of a 13-2 run after halftime, which trimmed an 18-point deficit to just seven. But UConn would get no closer, as a Bryce Hopkins (6'7''-F/G-2001) jumper and Ejiofor three padded the St. John’s advantage back to double digits. At that point, the party was on inside Madison Square Garden.
“We just couldn’t settle into the game, and then it just kind of unraveled for us,” Hurley said. “If we put some game pressure on them down the stretch, I thought that we had a chance.”
It was not to be, as St. John’s slammed the door over the final 12 minutes. Hopkins and Ejiofor each tallied 18 points to lead the Red Storm to its latest trophy, with both landing on the all-tournament team. Ejiofor, in his Garden finale, complemented his scoring with nine rebounds and seven blocked shots, earning the Dave Gavitt Award as the tournament’s most outstanding player.
“He’s one of the best players in college I’ve ever coached against,” Hurley said. “The rage that he plays with, the fire that he plays with, that guy’s just a total butt-kicker. That guy is a true difference maker that elevates everyone around him.”
UConn will await its NCAA Tournament fate on Selection Sunday just as St. John’s will, only for a second straight season, the program that has billed itself as New York’s Team can continue to call itself Big East champions.
“We had to battle through adversity all season,” Ejiofor reflected. “Nobody believed that we could get to this moment but us. Everybody in the locker room and these guys, they earned it. This is what they came here for.”

Final:
St. John's - UConn 72-40

Semis:
St. John's - Seton Hall 78-68
UConn - Georgetown 67-51

Courtesy of bigeast.com