Doug McDermott snuck behind the St. John’s defense and scored his 24th and 25th points of the night on a layup. There was 8:41 left and Creighton held a one-point lead.
McDermott, the National Player of the Year candidate and NBA prospect, wouldn’t score again. Hounded by constant double teams and forced out of the paint by the physical play of St. John’s long and athletic forwards, he wouldn’t take another shot, either.
And — no coincidence — St. John’s would pick up its biggest win of the year, outscoring the 12th-ranked Bluejays 13-6 over the final 8:41, and prevailing 70-65 at the Garden Sunday night.
“McDermott’s a big-time player, he got loose in the first game,” St. John’s guard D’Angelo Harrison said, referring to McDermott’s 39-point outburst in a Jan. 28 win over St. John’s in Omaha, Neb. “But we had his number tonight.”
Harrison’s clutch NBA-range 3-pointer with 2:10 left proved to be crucial, the go-ahead basket in the see-saw affair, and the junior guard added five free throws over the final 19.6 seconds as St. John’s (15-9, 5-6) won for the sixth time in seven games.
“It was one of the [only] open shots I had all night. I buried it,” Harrison said. “The team has a lot of confident in me. Coach [Steve Lavin] does a good job calling your number and he called mine tonight, and I delivered.”
The victory, St. John’s first over a ranked opponent in five tries this season, was the kind of résumé-building victory the Red Storm have been in search of to bolster their suddenly surging NCAA Tournament credentials. St. John’s has won three straight Big East games and trails third-place Xavier by two games in the loss column after starting the conference season 0-5.
“To get this out of the way, we can just take off now,” junior forward Sir’Dominic Pointer said. “We’re finding our little swag. We’re in our groove right now. We’re hard to beat if we play like this.”
St. John’s nearly knocked off Creighton (19-4, 9-2) 12 days ago, when it rallied from 18 down before McDermott’s 3-pointer with 2.5 seconds left sealed its fate. JaKarr Sampson and Pointer, the two forwards who spent much of the evening on McDermott, made sure history didn’t repeat itself, giving the All-American fits down the stretch.
“I said, ‘Doug McDermott beat us last time, let someone else beat us this time,’ ” Pointer said. “It worked out.”
Over the past month, St. John’s has improved in every facet — including the crucible of a must-win game down the stretch against a formidable foe, succeeding where it had previously faltered.
On Creighton’s final three possessions, when it trailed by just two points, St. John’s forced the ball out of McDermott’s hands, resulting in three missed jumpers. Over the final 2:18, Creighton managed just two points. McDermott scored a game-high 25 points, but he needed 18 shots to get them.
“They did a great job of taking me away, they did a great job of switching whenever I came off screens,” McDermott said. “They were really disciplined a lot more down the stretch there, so you got to give them a lot of credit. … They’re a really physical team and they do it with discipline.”
Harrison led St. John’s with 19 points, Chris Obekpa had 11 points and five rebounds and Phil Greene IV and Pointer notched nine points apiece.
More importantly, St. John’s defense was at its best, holding Creighton to 16 points below its average and 41 percent shooting from the field.
“There’s a gravitas to this group — it’s like a developing gravitas,” Lavin said. “It wasn’t there early in the year. We’ve found ourselves through struggle, adversity, hardship.
“And as a result, like a muscle, it’s getting stronger with each game.”
St. John’s hosted Cheick Diallo, a consensus top 10 junior in the country, out of Our Savior New American on Long Island, which was Obekba’s high school. …. Lavin picked up his 200th career victory against 115 losses in his 11th season as a head coach.