Rick Pitino adds Lou Carnesecca twist to UConn arena drama
The St. John’s-Connecticut venue saga has another layer to it.
A few weeks after Rick Pitino said he wanted to play the Huskies at Carnesecca Arena next season, he noted that athletic director Mike Cragg has requested to the league that the game be played on the 100th birthday of legendary coach Lou Carnesecca, which is Jan. 5, 2025.
Big East policy dictates that the conference can choose where the highest-profile games will be played if a school — such as St. John’s — plays more than two home games at multiple venues.
The Garden, where the Red Storm are playing eight times this year, will obviously want the Connecticut game played in its building. St. John’s hasn’t hosted the Huskies on campus since 1990.
“I’ll say this: This was planned in the summer. We want to honor Louie with a big game when he turns 100, whether it’s Connecticut, Villanova, Georgetown. We want it to be a champion team, and certainly Connecticut and Villanova are the two elite champions,” Pitino said. “I said this the other day, I don’t think Connecticut knows how to take a compliment.
“The fact we want to play them at Carnesecca is the ultimate compliment of all time, because the three best fan bases in all of college basketball for travel are Kentucky, Kansas and UConn. They travel the best, they have the best fans. They sell out at home, they have major crowds. We want a champion team, and if the Big East won’t give us a champion team, we’ll go out and get a non-conference gigantic opponent to honor Louie. Everything you hear about that is complementary to the [UConn] program.”
One of the reasons that Pitino has wanted to play the game on campus is to tweak UConn coach Dan Hurley, it is believed.
St. John’s and Pitino felt Hurley’s sideline behavior in fourth-ranked UConn’s win on Dec. 23 was inappropriate, according to sources.
Another factor is that Huskies fans have flooded the Garden when they play St. John’s.
When told of Pitino’s initial plans to move the game, Hurley said: “Everyone’s trying to get what we have. We’ve won four national championships since 2000 here at UConn, they haven’t had much success since then, especially when they went from Fran [Fraschilla] to Mike Jarvis and they had those real good teams with Ron Artest.
“They’re trying to do what they need to do to build their program up. But, anyone not named Duke, Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky — I’m probably going to miss a couple of [teams] here — they’re all going for where we’re at. We’ve had unbelievable success here in basketball. There are programs who haven’t been to a Final Four, or haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament in 20 years, so there’s obviously a lot of punching up.”
St. John’s associate head coach Steve Masiello tweeted in response: “I think Coach Pitino stopped punching up after his 5th Final 4, or was it his 6th ? no wait. I think it was after his 7th!”
Stay tuned. The teams meet at the Garden on Feb. 3.
There are almost certain to be fireworks that day.
