By Aidan Joly
It’s been just about four months since Hall of Fame head coach Rick Pitino left Iona for St. John’s.
A complete roster overhaul has occurred since then, and that St. John’s will become a recruiting powerhouse as long as Pitino is at the helm.
Earlier this week, the Red Storm picked up Harvard transfer and Brooklyn native Chris Ledlum, one of the best remaining players in the transfer portal. He was highly recruited while he was in the portal after averaging more than 18 points and eight rebounds with the Crimson this past season. He actually had originally committed to Tennessee earlier in the off-season, but entered the portal for a second time this summer and now lands closer to home.
The roster now features 12 newcomers and 10 transfers coming in. The Ledlum addition came at the expense of Quinn Slazinski, who had followed Pitino from Iona to St. John’s, who entered the portal shortly after the Ledlum commitment. He quickly committed to West Virginia.
It’s just the latest in high-profile additions for the Johnnies. Pitino picked up dynamic Penn transfer Jordan Dingle, Kansas transfer and former top prospect Zuby Ejiofor and flipped top-40 recruit Simeon Wilcher from North Carolina to come to Queens.
A big part of Pitino’s recruiting wins so far have been picking up local products in the New York City area. As previously mentioned, Ledlum is from Brooklyn, Dingle hails from Long Island and Wilcher is from New Jersey. The program is heavily recruiting high school stars Boogie Fland and V.J. Edgecombe, who are also both local.
Pitino has built an NCAA tournament roster in year one in a span of these four months, one that additionally is capable of making noise in the Big East. UConn, Marquette and Creighton all have better rosters on paper to this point, but having a Hall of Famer on the sidelines certainly doesn’t hurt your chances of competing at the top of the league. It’s a stunning shift from both the years of previous head coach Mike Anderson and more so the past two decades, which has been mainly filled with mediocrity (the program still has not won an NCAA tournament game since 2000).
St. John’s still does not have the best on-campus facilities. Playing at Madison Square Garden is an allure, but playing for Pitino is probably a bigger one. What happens if St. John’s wins, and wins a lot? Does St. John’s become even more of a threat in the recruiting trail?
When he was hired at Iona in 2020, he proudly pronounced that the Gaels were the last stop of his career. He slowly moved away from that over three years and guided the program to two NCAA tournaments, but did not win a game. He spent this past season with a foot out the door. He also left behind a major rebuilding project for the program and new head coach Tobin Anderson.
There’s no guarantee that Pitino will stay at St. John’s – a blueblood could come calling – and he’s said that he would like to coach for another decade. It’s likely that if and when he does leave, St. John’s is likely to be left in a similar situation that Iona is in right now.
But for St. John’s, it’s easy to tell why they would take this trade-off.
AJ Hoops 