Game #24: St. John's 42, Villanova 60 Recap

Bow wow wow. This one was a dog. St. John's loses a prime time game at Madison Square Garden, falling to 10-14 overall, 4-9 Big East. Villanova recovers from their loss to Georgetown with authority, improving to 15-9, 5-7 Big East.

Well... we held them to sixty?

Another blowout loss at home, to another mediocre opponent. This can't go on. Even if a team is getting regularly scraped, the fans and administration have one (or both) of two things to look forward to:

- an infusion of recruiting talent.
- close losses that with experience and training will turn into wins.

Instead, we get:

29-8 leads, which is cut to a 31-13 advantage at halftime. 13 points. At the half. And this isn't the first sub-20 point half. in fact, it seems to happen with any good team. and it happens to the best of coaches and some of the better teams. But when it happens over and over again, it's like your friend who keeps dating douchebags... maybe it's not just them, maybe you got to change.

The Red Storm weren't beat by hot outside shooting, they were beat by Casiem Drummond, Dwayne Anderson, Dante Cunningham, and Corey Stokes. Not by Scottie Reynolds and Corey Fisher.

Meanwhile, St. John's had one double figure scorer in Anthony Mason Jr., who came off the bench. DJ Kennedy played ten minutes, Lawrence played 27 and missed 8 of 10 shots. Burrell went 1-7 in 37 minutes but scored 6 points with his free throw attempts added in. Mike Cavataio had a nice line, 3-9 for 8 points, with 2 steals, a block, and 7 rebounds (4 offensive); he missed all 4 of his three-point attempts. Larry Wright and Sean Evans went scoreless.

The 18 point margin of victory in a road game is the largest for Villanova since January 2005. St. John's shot 25.5% overall, 14.3% from beyond the arc.

Malik Boothe on the loss:

"It was three things. We weren't hitting shots, we were turning the ball over and they were out-toughing us and getting rebounds. Sometimes that's just the way things go."

Translation: we can't score, we gave them easy opportunities to score, and we didn't fight hard enough. This season is almost over.

Head Coach Norm Roberts on the loss:

"We practiced pretty good. We came out, we tried to play with energy. We missed some shots and we became very young and took some ill-advised shots and they made shots. We need to shoot the ball better.''

Translation: I rolled some balls out and we played each other tough. We tried to play them tough but then we stopped. We can't score, and then we turned the biological clocks back and bought pacifiers and unlearned how to walk straight. Then we got our a** kicked. We need to wish and pray more."