Big East Basketball: Preseason power rankings for 2020-21 season

Projected Starters:

Guards – Rasheen Dunn-SR and Vince Cole-JR*

Forwards – Julian Champagnie-SO, Marcellus Earlington-JR, and Josh Roberts-JR

Bench – David Caraher-JR, Greg Williams-JR, Posh Alexander-FR, Dylan Wuse-FR, Arnoldo Toro-SR*, Damien Sears-SR, Isaih Moore-JR*, Johnathan McGriff-FR

The pandemic rocked the college basketball world last March with the cancellation of the NCAA tournament, but for a lot of teams, it did not end there. The unexpected transfer of the Johnnies best player, LJ Figueroa, was largely attributed to the outbreak in New York City and he’s off to what’s believed to be greener pastures at Oregon.

He leaves behind a depleted backcourt which will now heavily rely on his running mate a season ago, Rasheen Dunn (11.9 Pts, 3.8 Reb, 3.4 Ast). Dunn is going to have a big year, but the Figueroa loss is absolutely devastating as St. Johns would have had a fantastic backcourt and been primed for an NCAA tournament type of season had he stayed.

Joining Dunn in the backcourt will be Vince Cole, a JUCO All American who averaged 18.7 points and 6.2 boards per contest at USC-Salkehatchie last season. It will be a tall ask for the 6’6 guard to replace Figueroa especially with the jump in competition to the Big East, but he does provide something that the new Oregon Duck did not, shooting.

Cole shot 47% from the field and 44% from behind the arc and while not the playmaker Figueroa is, it will add a new element to coach Mike Anderson’s offense as they were the worst shooting team by percentage in the Big East a season ago. Expect to see a lot more from David Caraher (4.3 Pts, 2.0 Reb, 1.0 Ast) than the 15 minutes per game he played last seasons in the backcourt as well.

The Red Storm frontcourt, while not the best, might be the most athletic group of bigs and wings in the Big East. That wouldn’t be the case without the emergence of Julian Champagnie (9.9 Pts, 6.5 Reb, 0.8 Ast) toward the end of last season where he exploded and scored double figures in 7 of St. John’s final eight games.

He ended up on the Big East All-Freshman team, something that may not have happened without that final stretch and is now expected to be the focal point of Mike Anderson’s fast-paced style of play on both ends of the floor in 2020-21. He will have the help of two veteran members of the frontcourt, Marcellus Earlington (9.0 Pts, 4.7 Reb, 0.6 Ast) and Josh Roberts (5.0 Pts, 5.8 Reb, 0.8 Ast), both forwards who started multiple games a season ago.

For the first time in years, it doesn’t feel like St. John’s is playing primarily through young and inexperienced players. The program has been through a lot in the past several years whether that be coaching changes, transfers in and out, and injuries to key players that were supposed to take this team on NCAA tournament runs year in and year out, i.e. Mustapha Herron. What they are looking for is a little stability, and Anderson is carefully putting together the pieces to set St. John’s up for the long haul.

The emergence of guys like Champagnie and the expected success of Cole to go along with a solid crop of veteran contributors is a big step in the direction of stability and success and the Red Storm should be dancing in the next couple of years. In the immediate future, however, St John’s needs to quickly find out if it has somebody who can put this team on his shoulders and win games in crunch time and most are leaning towards Champagnie, but due to a small sample size of results.

I don’t believe that they necessarily have that “go-to guy”. Well, they did have him a few months ago, and his name was LJ. More than likely the day LJ Figueroa left campus in May was the same day the hopes of an NCAA Tournament in 2020-21 all but slipped away in Queens.