READING, Pa. — It has been roughly four months since the Rutgers basketball team’s season ended, when the Scarlet Knights were robbed by the referees of one last opportunity to tie or beat St. John’s in the waning seconds of the Big East tournament.
That was the game Red Storm forward Justin Brownlee traveled and threw the ball out of bounds with 1.7 seconds left — but referees Tim Higgins, Jim Burr and Earl Walton ruled that the contest was over.
“The high road is not one always taken,” said Rutgers coach Mike Rice. “Everybody is appreciative of how I handled it, especially because that is not always done in athletics.”
Just off his first full year in Piscataway and back on the recruiting trail during the NCAA live recruiting period, Rice has been approached often about the final moments of the Big East tournament loss. The conversation has a similar pattern: Rice is applauded for how he handled the wild ending postgame and is offered apologies for how it went down.
His response is always the same.
“The last play doesn’t bother me,” he told The Post during Hoop Group’s Team Camp at Albright College in Reading, Pa. “The last three minutes bothered me.”
Like he did at the time, Rice lauded Higgins, Burr and Walton as “being as good as it gets in the Big East.”
The demanding and intense coach felt the Scarlet Knights took a positive step forward in his first year at the helm, though they failed to finish .500, one of the goals he had set.
Next winter, Rice would like to set a Rutgers record for Big East wins — nine — which would equate to a .500 mark in the powerhouse conference.
It won’t be easy with such a young, albeit talented, team. Rice is looking forward to his incoming class that includes former Rice High standout Kadeem Jack, a 6-foot-9 power forward and high-scoring guard Myles Mack, formerly of St. Anthony in Jersey City. They will join rising juniors Dane Miller and Austin Johnson and soon-to-be sophomores Gilvydas Biruta and Mike Poole.
“We changed the culture of the program, where losing was expected,” he said. “We certainly upgraded our talent level and we got people excited about Rutgers basketball again.”