NEW YORK \u2014 Rick Pitino doesn\u2019t put much stock in his St. John\u2019s team being No. 1 in the Big East Conference preseason poll for the first time in three decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really don\u2019t pay too much attention to prognosticating because especially in this day and age, I don\u2019t even know the names of the players (on the other teams),\u201d the Hall of Fame coach said at Big East media day.<\/p>\n
The Red Storm received seven of the first-place votes from the conference\u2019s coaches Tuesday. UConn garnered the other four. It\u2019s the first time since 1991-92 that St. John\u2019s held the top spot in the preseason poll.<\/p>\n
The team is led by Zuby Ejiofor, who was selected as the conference\u2019s preseason player of the year. The senior forward averaged 14.7 points and 8.1 rebounds while shooting nearly 58% from the field last season.<\/p>\n
The Huskies have the preseason freshman of the year in Braylon Mullins.<\/p>\n
St. John\u2019s and UConn were reversed in the AP Top 25 preseason poll with the Huskies ranked fourth and the Red Storm fifth. It\u2019s the highest preseason ranking ever for St. John\u2019s in the AP poll.<\/p>\n
Creighton and Providence followed UConn with Marquette and Georgetown next. Then came Villanova, Xavier, DePaul, Butler and Seton Hall.<\/p>\n
The conference welcomes two new coaches with Kevin Willard taking over at Villanova and Richard Pitino getting the head job at Xavier.<\/p>\n
The two Pitinos will face off on Jan. 24 and Feb. 9.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat will be an added storyline,\u201d Richard Pitino said. \u201cRegardless of my dad, St. John\u2019s is really, really good. In year one to be playing a St. John\u2019s or a UConn. Top-10, top-20 teams, we better be ready to go. It\u2019s going to be a real tough challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 Rick Pitino doesn\u2019t put much stock in his St. John\u2019s team being No. 1 in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":322564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[1339,1317,1337,1338,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-322563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115415164476180620","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}