St. John's Red Storm at Carnesecca Arena and Madison Square Garden
New York City has a college basketball team nearly as legendary as the Big Apple itself. The St. John's Red Storm splits its home schedule between Carnesecca Arena in Queens, which opened in 1961 and seats 5,602, and Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, which opened in 1968 and has a capacity of 19,812. The team is coached by Mike Anderson, who had success at UAB, Missouri and Arkansas before replacing Chris Mullin after the 2018-19 season.
St. John's Red Storm Men's Basketball History
St. John's University first fielded a team in 1907, and from their inception until 1994, they were known as the Redmen. In 1910-11, St. John's went 11-0 and were retroactively awarded a national championship by the Helms Athletic Foundation. The Red Storm are five-time champions of the National Invitation Tournament (1943, 1944, 1959, 1965 and 1989), with a sixth NIT title in 2003 vacated due to an ineligible player. St. John's have also had major success in the NCAA tournament, reaching the Final Four in 1952 and 1985, and losing the 1952 final to Kansas by a score of 80-63. Original Celtics legend Joe Lapchick led St. John's from 1935 to 1947, and from 1956 to 1965, with future UNC and South Carolina coach Frank McGuire leading the team from 1947 to 1952. Lou Carnesecca coached St. John's from 1965 to 1992, except for three seasons when he coached the New York Nets of the ABA, and never had a losing season with the team.
Since 1979, St. John's basketball has been synonymous with Big East basketball, winning five conference regular-season championships and three Big East tournaments in that span. Behind the play of Chris Mullin, St. John's became one of three Big East teams, along with Villanova and Georgetown, to play in the 1985 Final Four. In recent years, the Red Storm has adapted to the changing college basketball landscape, joining six other Catholic-affiliated Big East teams, — Butler, Creighton and Xavier — in 2013 to create the modern Big East Conference. In 2019, St. John's reached their first NCAA tournament since 2015, losing to fellow 11th-seed Arizona State 74-65 in the First Four at Dayton.