{"id":163603,"date":"2026-03-15T00:14:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/163603\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T00:14:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:14:15","slug":"rick-pitino-is-exactly-where-he-wants-to-be-with-st-johns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/163603\/","title":{"rendered":"Rick Pitino is exactly where he wants to be with St. John&#8217;s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There wasn\u2019t any place Rick Pitino would rather have been on Saturday night than Madison Square Garden, coaching for St. John\u2019s, the program he resurrected in his hometown, the Big East Tournament championship on the line, <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/03\/13\/sports\/st-johns-uconn-is-the-stuff-of-dreams-in-big-east-tounrmaent\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">against a future Hall of Fame coach like Dan Hurley<\/a> and a UConn team with national championship ambitions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe loves it,\u201d Mike Pitino, the oldest son, told The Post. \u201cHe is so competitive that he loves it, and that\u2019s why I don\u2019t think he\u2019ll ever retire is just because he\u2019s extremely competitive and he can\u2019t sit still, so I can\u2019t imagine him in retirement.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Mike Pitino, 48, was watching his father reach for a historic back-to-back Big East tournament championship triumph along with his mother, brothers Ryan and Richard, and sister Jacqueline. Brother Christopher had his flight canceled out of Tampa.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLast year was pretty special because I know that St. John\u2019s had such a long drought from the Big East championship, both regular season and tournament, so that was really special,\u201d Mike Pitino said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There wasn\u2019t any place Rick Pitino would rather have been on Saturday night than Madison Square Garden, coaching&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7729,67435,3361,9,24,55,54,56,3362,319,431,428,3363],"class_list":["post-163603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-big-east","tag-big-east-tournament","tag-college-basketball","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-rick-pitino","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists","tag-sports-plus","tag-st-johns-red-storm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}