The entire season has been a long time coming for the St. John’s basketball program but perhaps nothing more so than the Big East Player of the Year Award returning to Queens.
RJ Luis has been named as the conference’s top player and becomes the first St. John’s player to win the award since Walter Berry during the 1985-86 season.
Since the award was created during the 1979-80 campaign, the Johnnies housed the honor four times in seven years including its run of four straight seasons when Chris Mullin had at least a share of the award three straight times prior to Berry before its drought.
Still, Luis puts the program in a tie for fourth, with Notre Dame, for the most Big East Player of the Year Awards in league history.
Luis’ rise this season came with some doubt as his sophomore season was filled with injuries that forced him to miss extended time beginning with a broken hand in a preseason practice to recurring shin splints that hampered his development during his first season in Queens.
He underwent double shin surgery during the offseason and was cleared to return to the basketball court in the late summer before getting the green light to be allowed for contact in the early stages of fall workouts. He had doubts if he would ever reach his potential on the basketball court but that is now a distant memory.
Since, he has become one of the best players in the country and averaged 18.1 points, 7.1 rebounds, 2.2 assists, and 1.4 steals per game this season for a Red Storm team that blitzed the rest of the conference, winning the regular season title by three games.
He was named as a unanimous selection to the All-Big East First Team earlier in the week joining Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner, Marquette’s Kam Jones, and Villanova’s Eric Dixon with the distinction.
Now Luis will turn his attention on winning the Big East Tournament with St. John’s, beginning its postseason on Thursday afternoon (12:00 p.m. ET, Peacock) against either Providence or Butler.