Rick Pitino shreds individual players, team after St. John's blows 19-point lead vs. Seton Hall

St. John’s blew a 19-point lead against Seton Hall to drop its third straight contest on Sunday afternoon, and coach Rick Pitino vividly expressed his frustration following the contest.

Pitino made several comments after the game that would raise the eyebrows of potential recruits, as he has done a handful of times this season.

This time came across a little different.

He blasted his team’s speed, individually pointing out the players that weren’t up to snuff for him. He also promised he’d never have a team like this again.

“Look: Joel (Soriano)‘s slow laterally, he’s not fast on the court,” Pitino said, according to college basketball writer Jaden Daly. “Chris Ledlum is slow laterally, Sean Conway‘s slow laterally. Brady (Dunlap)‘s physically weak, Drissa (Traore) is slow laterally.”

Pitino even had other programs catching strays in his postgame rant, with a dig at Missouri, intended or not.

“You could be at Missouri and recruit slow players,” Rick Pitino said. “Believe me, it’s not St. John’s. We had to put together a team at the last second. We will never, ever, do that again.”

The game itself was a disaster. St. John’s was up by 19 points on Seton Hall in the first half at one point. It finished the half leading by 11. By game’s end, Seton Hall was a 68-62 winner.

And it’s easy to wonder if Pitino’s comments might make recruiting an uphill climb.

He slammed the team’s facilities and noted he knew this season was going to be a bust from the beginning, leading one to wonder where coaching comes in.

“After I spent the summer with them, I knew it was gonna be a difficult year,” Rick Pitino said. “I knew it. I’m hoping we could finish over .500 for the season.”

And on facilities:

“Do we have shitty facilities? Yes, we do. But we’re doing something about that.”

Whether Pitino can do anything about the negativity surrounding his program — some of it unquestionably created by his candor at this point — remains to be seen. St. John’s has five games remaining but has lost five of its last six.

In any case, it’s not every day you see a coach torch his team as much as Pitino did after Sunday’s loss.

If it takes a full reset and another season to get things in place, Pitino at least sounds like he’ll approach things very differently. But there’s no spinning this year and Rick Pitino mostly sounds done trying.

“We kind of lost this season with the way we recruited,” he said. “We recruited the antithesis of the way I coach. It’s a good group, they try hard, but they’re just not very tough.”