A bad start last year probably cost the Johnnies a tourney berth. Can this year’s group fuse together fast enough to stop that from happening again?
Team: St. John’s Red Storm
2023-24 Record: 18-15, 11-7 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Tied for third with Villanova and Marquette; won the tiebreaker to end up ahead of both of them as the #3 seed in the conference tournament.
Final 2023-24 Her Hoop Stats Ranking: #85 out of 360 Division 1 teams.
Postseason? Losing in the Big East tournament quarterfinals to #6 seeded Georgetown sent the Red Storm to the WBIT, the secondary postseason tournament that the NCAA started this season. St. John’s beat Florida by 19 in Gainesville, but then lost by one at Toledo in the second round. Even worse: The Johnnies led by as many as nine in the fourth quarter and were up double digits in the third quarter, too.
Key Departures: Just two, but they’re pretty big departures. Unique Drake and Jillian Archer were #1 and #2 in scoring on the roster last season, so that’s more than 29 points a game out the door, including 18 alone from Drake. Archer led the team in rebounding at 7.6 per game, so she was a kiiiind of double-double threat in every game as long as you could speed St. John’s up from what Her Hoop Stats clocked as the fourth slowest tempo in the country. Drake and Archer were the only two St. John’s players to start every single one of their 33 games last season and two of three to average over 30 minutes per game as well. There’s a lot of minutes and usage and continuity exiting the program with them, but that was a known quantity for the Red Storm, as both women were on their fifth year of eligibility.
Key Returners: Even with their slower-than-frozen-molasses pace, St. John’s had three double-digit scorers last season, and Ber’Nyah Mayo was the third one at 10.9 points per game. She also led the team with 3.5 assists per game and only missed one start while playing in all 33 games.
Mayo is the clear headliner amongst STJ’s returning players, but they’ve got a notable core of contributors coming back. Jailah Donald and Phoenix Gedeon were part-time starters while playing in all 33 games, and Tara Daye had that part-time starter tag in the 31 games that she played. Skye Owen only started four times, but she did play in all 33 games, and she averaged more than 22 minutes, too. Everyone in the group here averaged somewhere between two and six points per game, which is partially because Drake and Archer did so much and partially because St. John’s had such a slow pace. They all averaged between 2.0 and 0.9 assists per game with Gedeon as the only one below a helper per night. That’s okay though, as Gedeon was the top rebounder of the group even with the fewest minutes on average at 4.5 caroms per contest.
Key Additions: While the Red Storm aren’t losing that much over all — just three players in total from the roster — they are adding a bunch of people by way of four transfers and two freshmen. We should note A’riel Little as the more intriguing of the two freshmen, as the 5’4” guard from Brooklyn is ranked #89 in the country by Blue Star and #100 by ESPN. She averaged 19.4 points and 7.2 assists per game as a high school junior according to STJ’s press release on her signing last November.
Ariana Vanderhoop is probably the most likely contributor for St. John’s out of the transfer group. She’s on her bonus season of eligibility after four years at Monmouth, and the 5’9” guard started nearly every game for four years with the Hawks. Vanderhoop — and we have to acknowledge the great name here — averaged 10.6 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 1.6 assists per game as a senior which was mostly speaking a repeat of what she did as a junior.
The Red Storm get a little international flavor to their roster with the addition of Jade Blagrove, who hails from the Netherlands. The 6’2” forward was at South Florida for four games of action in the 2020-21 season that doesn’t count towards eligibility before landing at Manhattan for the past three campaigns. After being a part-time starter as a sophomore, she was a full-time starter the past two years and averaged 8.4 points and 7.1 rebounds per game this past season. She just missed out on fitting into the top 250 in the country in defensive rebounding rate, and the Johnnies are going to need someone to clean the glass.
Lashae Dwyer joins Vanderhoop and Blagrove as one-year-only players for the Red Storm. She’s been at Miami for the past three years, and the 5’6” guard from Canada averaged 6.7 points and 2.7 rebounds as a part-time starter for the Hurricanes in 2023-24. She had career bests in minutes, points, rebounds, assists, and steals, and I would presume that the retirement of head coach Katie Meier played a part in Dwyer looking for a new home for her final year of hoops.
That leaves Kylie Lavelle (6’2” forward) as the only transfer we haven’t mentioned. She was a starter for Drexel as a freshman, but a backup for 12 minutes a game at Penn State last season after transferring to play for Carolyn Kieger. I presume she’s trying to get back into a starting lineup somewhere, but as you can kind of tell from what we’ve said already, I don’t think that’s automatically likely. She scored 11 points a game in just over 21 minutes with the Dragons, but only 3.4 points and 2.3 rebounds in 12 minute a night for the Nittany Lions against a Big Ten schedule.
Coach: Joe Tartamella, entering his 13th season in charge of the Red Storm and overall as a Division 1 head coach. He has a record of 223-158.
Outlook: Let’s start with saying that losing to Georgetown in the Big East tournament had no impact on St. John’s missing the NCAA tournament. Yes, they finished tied for third in the Big East, yes, they had the tiebreakers to be the #3 seed in the conference tournament. They also started out the year 2-5, taking losses to Monmouth, VCU, UCF, and Jackson State. That turned into three Quadrant 3 losses and a Quadrant 4 loss by the time people started to think about Selection Sunday, and the Red Storm’s only top 40 wins were a season sweep of #40 Marquette. They had the sixth best NET in the league, so the 15-8 record in between the bad start and the postseason had wasn’t enough to make the Georgetown game make a difference.
What was the difference?
St. John’s couldn’t score to save their lives to start the season. For (almost) the entire first month of the season, the Red Storm was putting up just 87.8 points per 100 possessions against top 200 teams and 93.8 against everyone, according to Hoop Explorer. After that awful start? 103.8 points per 100 trips down the floor against everyone and 103.5 against top 200 foes. That’s a huge jump! Thank goodness they figured it out after four weeks, or things could have gotten ugly pretty quickly in Queens.
But that was with Unique Drake and Jillian Archer, two key components that were returning to the squad from the year before. What about now? What is Joe Tartamella going to do to get his team off on the right foot right away? Thank goodness he got a contract extension after parlaying a First Four appearance into an NCAA tournament win in 2022, which gave him his first tourney victory since 2014….. in his first tournament appearance since 2016.
The Red Storm probably weren’t that far from qualifying for the NCAA tournament last year. If they could sweep a Marquette team that goofed off down the stretch and still made it in pretty cleanly, they couldn’t have been that far. Their bad start ended the conversation before it got started. In theory, Tartamella’s on track with something here….. but he can’t let another bad start handcuff another season.
The good news is that he has a solid rotation core returning to work with. Does he have a true star player that we can see immediately to rely on, the way they did with Unique Drake to the tune of a top 150 usage rate in the country according to Her Hoop Stats? It doesn’t look like that he does, but maybe that’s a good thing? A little bit more spreading it around could lead to making the Red Storm a little bit more dangerous.
If STJ was coming off a tournament appearance, I’d say that the Johnnies are clearly the third best team in the Big East heading into the season. There’s too many questions for Marquette (coaching change) and Villanova (top two players transferred) to say that they’re in that #3 spot behind Creighton and UConn. But they’re not coming off that tournament appearance, are they? There’s a “we all learned a lesson” version of St. John’s that makes them the #3 team this year….. and there’s a “lesson? what lesson?” version of the Johnnies that could easily land them muddling around at .500 in league play at best. 11-7 isn’t that far from 9-9, after all.