Tuesday night inside the Cintas Center was an eye-opening experience for Xavier head coach Sean Miller after the St. John’s basketball team dominated the action for an 82-72 victory.
The final score was not indicative of how much the Red Storm controlled things on the road, leading by as many as 18 points midway through the second half before fans made their way to the exits.
St. John’s (13-3, 4-1 Big East) out-hustled Xavier in every facet, winning the rebounding margin by 20, grabbing 20 offensive rebounds, and scoring 20 more second chance points than the Musketeers.
“They’re not making a lot of 3-point shots over the last couple of games, but if you want to talk about a hard playing, tough minded group, I don’t know if there is a team in the country that embodies those qualities better than them,” Miller said during his postgame press conference.
“They exposed us at a very high level.”
The Red Storm were just 2-of-16 from 3-point range yet managed to take a total of 81 shot attempts compared to Xavier’s 60 attempts. The Johnnies shot 49.2-percent on its 2-point field goals.
“There are times when your team loses and you feel really good about the effort, the togetherness, and a lot of things that happen in a game,” Miller continued. “I’ll put this game in a different category. The standard of effort and togetherness wasn’t there.”
St. John’s led by as many as 14 points in the first half before Xavier cut (9-7, 1-4 Big East) its deficit to four at halftime. The Musketeers never got closer than that margin in the second half after coming out of the locker room with back-to-back turnovers that led to easy baskets for the Red Storm.
“This is our low point,” Miller said after his team has dropped seven of ten games after starting the season 6-0. In its last eight games against power conference teams, Xavier has lost seven of those games with its only victory coming at home against Seton Hall.
“If you look at St. John’s, I think they played with high effort. If you looked at our team tonight, as difficult as that is to say, we weren’t able to do that tonight.”
It will not be long before the two teams meet each other again as Xavier will travel to Madison Square Garden for its rematch with the Johnnies on Wednesday, January 22.