CINCINNATI — Chris Ledlum isn’t checking BracketMatrix.com.
He doesn’t have the NET rankings page bookmarked.
He isn’t refreshing KenPom.com after every game.
Still, the St. John’s senior forward hears the talk. It’s hard to avoid.
Right now, the Johnnies are an NCAA Tournament team and he can’t help but imagine what that would be like, to reach his first tournament with his hometown school.
“Not to sound cliché, but it would mean everything to do something like that in front of the home crowd,” Ledlum, a Brooklyn native, said ahead of St. John’s trip to Xavier on Wednesday. “I know Jordan [Dingle], Joel [Soriano] and the local guys feel the same way. The fan base is the people we grew up around. It would be amazing.”
It is something the players talk about, and certainly think about.
Only Daniss Jenkins, Zuby Ejiofor, Cruz Davis, Sadiku Ibine Ayo and Nahiem Alleyne have played in the tournament before.
Ledlum and Dingle both opted to come home to play for Rick Pitino at St. John’s after three seasons in the Ivy League in part because they envisioned the opportunity to play in March Madness for the first time.
Soriano stayed in Queens following the coaching change for the same reason. For all three seniors, the chance to play on the sport’s biggest stage is looking like a reality now.
“It’s definitely something that’s on everybody’s mind, especially the guys who haven’t played there. Everyone wants to play in the NCAA Tournament, they want to win games,” Ledlum said. “Just to get there and have that chance, it [would] mean the world to us.”
Most Bracketology projections have the Johnnies (13-7, 5-4) slotted as an eight-seed at the moment, firmly in the tournament, but not far enough from the bubble to be comfortable.
St. John’s certainly looks like a tournament team based on its résumé (7-6 in Quad 1 and 2 games), metrics (NET ranking of 35, KenPom ranking of 33) and overall trajectory. It sits 5-4 in the Big East, with three of those losses by a combined six points to No. 1 Connecticut, No. 9 Marquette and No. 13 Creighton.
The Storm are getting healthy. Alleyne (right ankle) is expected to return against Xavier and Ledlum’s ankle is close to 100 percent after it cost him a few games earlier this month.
Pitino repeatedly said early in the year he expected this team to begin to hit its stride in February, that it just couldn’t absorb too many losses so that it would be in a bad position. With the month arriving Thursday, the Johnnies seem poised to go on a run.
“I think we understand the importance of the rest of the games and we don’t want to leave anything up to chance,” Ledlum said. “We’re definitely in a place where we’re ready to take back off and win a bunch of games.”
But, Ledlum added: “I know we can do better [than where we are now]. I don’t let projections really excite me. It’s a long season. We have to stay the course, keep going.”
Pitino has embraced the tournament talk. Before the Johnnies’ blowout of Villanova, he told the team that it was a game it had to win to go dancing. It had lost three in a row and couldn’t afford to let that losing streak expand any further. The Johnnies responded by playing 40 intense minutes and coasting to their first season sweep of the Wildcats since 1992-93.
After the victory, a proud Pitino talked about how much he wanted to see this group reach the dance, particularly the guys who had never been there before. Now, St. John’s has to build on that win, or that spot in the tournament could become precarious.