NEW YORK — In front of a roisterous sellout crowd on Friday night in Manhattan, No. 3 UConn and No. 22 St. John’s s set the tone for what might be one of the best sports weekends of 2026.
A three-day run studded with high-end ranked matchups in college basketball, the start of the Winter Olympics in Italy and Super Bowl LX awaiting in Santa Clara on Sunday was jump-started by one of the best budding rivalries in college sports.
Rick Pitino, Dan Hurley and the reigniting of Huskies vs. Johnnies.
For the first time in 26 years, St. John’s can claim a three-game winning streak over Connecticut. It got there Friday night with a nonstop full-court press, an All-American performance from senior center Zuby Ejiofor and a vocal security blanket from a home crowd that was as red-dominant as any Garden game against UConn in the past decade-plus.
“I looked around during the anthem and saw a lot of red,” Huskies coach Dan Hurley said. “That felt like a real road game.”
SJU won 81-72 to improve to 18-5 (11-1 in the Big East).
“I thought the Garden was as good as I’ve seen it,” Red Storm coach Rick Pitino said.
Two years ago, UConn fans easily outnumbered St. John’s backers in their own building. Those days are gone, at least as long as Pitino’s strutting the sidelines in an immaculately tailored suit.
“They came out, and you heard it right from the anthem,” SJU associate head coach Steve Masiello told CBS Sports. “They were ready to go.”
This was MSG at its best, and with press row right next to the St. John’s student section, it was all too palpable just how important this game was for the home school. St. John’s opened the season as a preseason top-10 team but faltered to a 7-4 start that dropped to 9-5 with a vexing home loss to sub-.500 Providence in early January.
The Johnnies haven’t lost since, now winners of nine straight.
Pitino coached his 903rd college win, tying him (unofficially, due to vacated victories from his time at Louisville) with Roy Williams for third-most in men’s D-I. Friday marked the first win for St. John’s at home vs. a top-three team in 15 years (No. 3 Duke in February 2011).
“This was hard, one of our hardest games,” Hurley told CBS Sports in the Huskies’ locker room afterward. “This is a much different team than the one that was playing in nonconference. … On the road and their style and their physicality, they have as much talent and physicality and personnel as anyone we played to this point in the year, excluding maybe Arizona, because they’ve been the clear No. 1 team.”
The result marked UConn’s first loss in 18 games (third-longest streak in program history) and leveled the 22-2 Huskies in the Big East loss column with the Red Storm.
“They’re grown-ass men,” Hurley said.
St. John’s muscling its way to a clear win was a key result for the Big East, which is comfortably fifth out of the Power Five leagues this season and is rummaging through a bad year. The conference may not send more than three teams to the NCAA Tournament (Villanova being the safe third candidate at this point). Had Connecticut won on Friday, it would’ve been two games clear of the league and the overwhelming favorite to run away with the conference’s regular-season championship.
St. John’s preventing that from happening was a good outcome for the conference. Now the race for first place can begin. Plus, the Big East needed a high-wattage game like what went down here in the Garden to remind everyone that the top of the conference is still spectacular.
Fans were on their feet all throughout the arena for the majority of the second half, when St. John’s continued to put on the press and found separation thanks to Ejiofor’s relentless pursuit. He finished with a game-high 21 points, plus 10 rebounds, seven assists, three blocks and two steals.
“Tough on a two day turnaround,” Hurley told me of preparing for that press. “They just bust your balls to get the ball inbounds.”
It’s not like UConn played poorly; the Huskies became the rare top-five team to lose despite shooting (at least) 55% overall and nearly 50% from 3 (9 for 19). Ironically, Hurley’s most valuable player was also his least reliable. Point guard Silas Demary Jr. provided one of the best dunks of the season as part of his team-high 18-point showing to go with seven rebounds and five assists.
But he also had a maddening nine turnovers; UConn finished with 15, which St. John’s converted into 20 points.
“It was a great adventure,” Hurley deadpanned afterward. “It was a roller coaster ride.”
This was the ninth time UConn and St. John’s met when both were ranked. St. John’s now has the 5-4 edge. It was only the third time both met under the Garden lights when both had a number next to their names in the regular season. (The previous years: 1999 and 1991.)
And, incredibly, Friday was only the second time in Big East history that the conference had a matchup in February with each team having one or fewer losses in league play. (The other in 2009 when UConn beat Pitino-coached Louisville 68-51.)
Ejiofor can do so much to carry this team, but he didn’t need to be a solo act on Friday night. Dillon Mitchell’s multi-faceted role as a point forward played a big part (he finished with 15 points and six rebounds, including a tip-back layup late that punctured UConn’s chances of rallying), as did backup point guard Dylan Darling, whose defense in the second half gave St. John’s a jolt that led to a 55-45 lead after the teams were knotted 39-all at halftime.
St. John’s showed no effects of its 12-hour waylay from earlier in the week, when its travel was stalled and the team had to stay in Chicago an extra night after beating DePaul. That led to what Masiello told me was “a glorified walk-through Wednesday night” to ready for Connecticut.
“Coach Pitino was as good as I’ve seen him building a team up for this game,” Masiello said. “He made sure we knew how good UConn was. He made sure we knew that, and we watched multiple games to understand that, which is normal for us, but today, it was just all about building these guys up and confidence and really having great belief, and the guys just fed off of it.”
It’s no shock that Pitino has figured out a way to coach around the fact that he doesn’t have an ideal and proven point guard to play 30-plus minutes a night. Darling is a great chance-of-pace guy off the bench, but Dillon Mitchell (who plays the 3 or the 4) is as much a point guard as anyone on the team. The evolution’s been interesting, and now it’s looking like the Johnnies will be a factor into March for the second straight season.
This comes after the group looked like one of the sport’s biggest disappointments by Christmas.
“Outside [speculation], I get it,” Masiello said. “Inside, no. … We didn’t close out games early in the year. And sometimes, when you have four new starters … that’s going to happen. But I think there was never a doubt about what our ceiling could be. I know no one doubted that here. I understand the outsiders. I get it. A lot of noise, it’s New York, lot of expectations early. I think it might have been: got to go through some stuff to get where you need to.”
For the past month, St. John’s has been what it was projected to be back in the fall: a top-10 team.
It just took the first boxing match against one of the best teams in the country. Will the taste of blood in its mouth motivate UConn to avoid this feeling again for the rest of the Big East schedule?
“I don’t know,” Hurley told me in the locker room afterward. “You’re not really sure because we haven’t lost in a while, but I’d imagine a team of our quality is going to respond.”
We get Part 2 in Hartford on February 25. If both teams keep going the way they’ve been going, they’ll enter that game a combined 48-7 and almost certainly both ranked in the top 10. The regular-season title may well be decided that night.
Even in a down year for such a proud conference, at least the two most important coaches and important teams are coming through to keep the stakes high and the basketball as good as you’ll find anywhere else in the sport.
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