‘It was embarrassing’: Villanova is at a critical juncture after getting routed by St. John’s

NEW YORK — A basketball season is like a book. Each game is a chapter, and all of them combined make up parts of the whole. They aren’t all equal, though. Like many books, some chapters hold more weight. Some feature a story’s climax.

It was fitting, then, that Villanova hit a crossroads of sorts in its season here, at the World’s Most Famous Arena. It’s hard to call a Jan. 24 road game at Madison Square Garden vs. St. John’s a “must-win” with a dozen regular-season games to go, but it was too easy to brush it off as just another Big East game. It wasn’t. Villanova entered having lost three of its last four, in the middle of five straight Quadrant 1 games. Blink a few times, and you might miss a season slipping into the danger zone.

That’s where it is now, firmly in the land of discomfort. Villanova got blown away by a Red Storm surge in the second half and lost, 70-50, Wednesday night. There was a coronation of sorts in the press conference room afterward, officially announcing a return to relevancy for a Red Storm program that is heading one way under Rick Pitino, while a Villanova program feels like it’s heading in the opposite. A St. John’s media relations staffer held a laptop against his chest and rattled off some of the history. St. John’s swept Villanova in the regular season for the first time since 1993. It beat Villanova by 20-plus for the first time since 1998.

The details of the disaster were visible in just one stat line: St. John’s grabbed 15 offensive rebounds and scored 17 second-chance points. In a turning-point type of game, Villanova got outworked in almost every facet.

“It was embarrassing, for sure,” said Villanova guard TJ Bamba, a New York native who had a simple explanation: “They played harder than us. They punked us. Enough said. It’s that simple.”

Said coach Kyle Neptune: “They threw the first punch, and we just never recovered.”

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The Wildcats (11-8, 4-4 Big East) briefly led, 4-3. St. John’s scored the next six and never looked back. The Red Storm led by 10, 32-22, at halftime. The 22 first-half points came after Villanova scored just 24 during Saturday’s loss to No. 1 Connecticut. The trend of starting a game without a sense of urgency continued, and so did a season of inconsistent three-point shooting. Villanova made 4 of its 25 three-point attempts. Its 50 points scored were the fewest in the Neptune era, and its four made threes were tied for the fewest the Wildcats made in a game since making two during a loss at Temple last season.

The three-point misses helped a St. John’s team that likes to play fast keep a Villanova defense that excels in the halfcourt on its heels too often. The Wildcats rarely got set up, and even when they did, they too often allowed St. John’s to have extra possessions. St. John’s finished with 64 possessions to Villanova’s 57.

There was a brief Villanova surge early in the second half that cut a 12-point deficit to five, 40-35, with 12 minutes, 46 seconds left in the game. But Pitino sensed what was happening, called timeout, and St. John’s put the game away with a 16-4 run.

So here Villanova stands, at a critical juncture. It is 4-4 in the Big East, tied for sixth place with Providence and Xavier. If Wednesday wasn’t a must-win, Saturday at Butler, always a tough place to play, certainly fits the bill. A loss would drop Villanova to 4-5, and after that is No. 14 Marquette, a team that crushed the Wildcats in Milwaukee last week. The number of gimmes on Villanova’s schedule are fewer and further between with Big East bottom-feeder DePaul in the rearview.

Was it problematic, then, to have this kind of effort, at this stage of the season?

“It’s the journey of a season,” said senior big man Eric Dixon, who led Villanova with 16 points and eight rebounds. “It goes up, it goes down. You’re going to go on a three-game losing streak, a three-game winning streak. At the end of the day, it happens. You just have to go back and get better.”

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Added Bamba: “It’s definitely something that we have to be able to hold each other accountable on. But I don’t know if I would say problematic, like it’s going to be something that lingers, because I know the group of men that we have.

“We’ll keep this taste in our mouth going into the next game and try to improve on it.”

They were the right things to say, but it’s not easy to believe in the remedies. Villanova players not named Bamba and Dixon combined for 22 points on 8-for-31 shooting. Before Bamba and Dixon spoke to reporters outside Villanova’s locker room, Justin Moore walked by with a steady limp. Villanova’s star guard, still recovering from a sprained knee, took just four shots Wednesday.

Neptune was asked what was said after such a stinging loss.

“We think back to even when we played [St. John’s] last, they’re playing at a different level,” he said. “The teams that get better have a chance.”

The teams that don’t? Well, those books have fewer pages.