Rick Pitino makes history in Year 2 with St John's, adds to case as greatest coach of all-time

Rick Pitino wins just about everywhere he goes. While it didn’t work with the Boston Celtics, Pitino can build a dominant college basketball team at just about any program in the country, and once again, he’s proving just how great he is, this time at St. John’s. With a 76-70 win over Butler on Wednesday night, the Johnnies clinched their first regular season Big East title in 33 years, and Pitino made some history of his own. 

Now a journeyman with a career full of – well, we’ll just call them ups and downs – Pitino became the first coach in college basketball history to win a regular season conference title with five different schools. It’s a record that is equally as impressive as it is unique. 

Rarely does a coach this good end up at five different programs, and aside from the scandal that temporarily chased him out of the sport and to Greece, Pitino may still be winning ACC titles at Louisville. However, the fact that Pitino has been forced to build winners in so many different situations, at schools of varying levels, and in different places, is absurdly impressive. 

Coach K is fairly universally recognized as the greatest coach in college basketball history, and with his five national championships and 1,202 career victories, rightfully so. Still, Coach K only ever coached in two places; Army and Duke. It’s easy to assume that a coach of his ilk could have also revived St. John’s, dominated the MAAC at Iona, or won a national title for each side of one college basketball’s fiercest rivalries, but he never had to prove it. Pitino did. 

If the 72-year-old Pitino manages to win another championship at St. John’s before riding off into the sunset, a coach as complicated as the sport itself, he’ll have a compelling case as the greatest of all-time or “The Goat” as the kids say far too frequently. 

Pitino is already fifth all-time in wins, equalling Dean Smith at 879 on Wednesday, and while he’ll likely never cross the 1,000-win threshold as Krzyzewski and Jim Boeheim both did, he belongs on their level as one of the best to do ever do it. Five regular season conference titles at five different schools is not the greatest achievement in college basketball coaching history, it inherently points to failures along the way, but it also allows us to confidently say that Rick Pitino can win anywhere, and that’s not true nearly every other legend in the pantheon of college basketball.