Not many coaches would suspend a player for two weeks leading into the NCAA Tournament.
But that’s just what St. John’s Steve Lavin did when he suspended Chris Obekpa after a failed drug test.
Lavin has struggled at St. John’s for a while, but despite some rumors he was on the hot seat
Has Lavin lost control of his team? That a player would risk so much for a moment isn’t a good sign in terms of the loyalty that he has to his coach either – especially when that coach was already on shaky ground.
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St. John’s has even gone so far as to put off any comment on Lavin’s future until after St. John’s plays in the tournament according to Zach Braziller of the New York Post. That’s never a good thing and it makes you wonder – was suspending Obekpa the sign of a coach who knows his job is secure or who is well aware that it’s already too late.
In my opinion, it’s the latter.
It says something when a guy like the New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro essentially says that St. John’s keeping Lavin is admitting they just want to be the underdog. Vaccaro makes it sound like keeping the coach who has helped St. John’s to the NCAA’s twice in 6 years – and whose tenure has been broken up by cancer and the death of his father – is accepting mediocrity.
If that opinion is shared by the university, then Lavin is toast with anything short of a National Title. Especially after this past year.
The Johnnies’ season began so well with a 13-1 record as they headed into Big East Conference play and a No. 15 ranking. They had some nice wins under their belt with a 69-57 win at Syracuse and a 70-61 win over Minnesota. They lost to Gonzaga, 73-66, but a close loss to an eventual 2 Seed is nothing to hang your head about.
Yes, everything looked great for Lavin’s squad as they headed to Newark to take on the Seton Hall Pirates.
It pretty much all went to hell from then on as Seton Hall beat the Red Storm, 78-67 on New Year’s Eve. St. John’s then lost six of their next nine games, including a 77-74 loss to Big East Conference bottom feeder Creighton. They also mixed in a loss to Duke in there, but otherwise they were all conference losses.
Then Lavin got his guys playing again and they went 7-2 to close out the conference season. Sure, they were 10-8 and looked mediocre for the first half of the season, but things had been looking up and they had momentum going into the conference tournament.
And then they got crushed by Providence in the first round and everything we had worried about during that first half of the conference schedule came roaring back.
This is a consistent theme for Lavin’s teams since his arrival in Queens. Inconsistent play across a season which at turns looks tremendous and then disastrous.
Before this season, Lavin led his team to back-to-back NIT invitations and was knocked out in the first and second round. And while his overall record isn’t bad (81-53), his conference record is mediocre at best (40-32).
During his four full seasons coaching (we can discount the season he was out because of sickness, 2011-12), the team’s conference record has been just 40-32 with the last three seasons being 8-10, 10-8 and 10-8. In those four years, the team has finished 5th, 11th, 3rd and 5th.
More than anything else though, Lavin’s struggles in tournaments are the biggest problem.
While he was joking, Lavin’s remark that he is a ‘poor conference tournament coach’ hits a little close to home, and more to the point, could be extended to non-conference tournaments as well – at least at St. John’s where he has been unable to make it out of the early rounds of any tournament.
He’s never won a tournament, neither conference nor NCAA, even when he was in command of UCLA and around a relatively unimpressive Pac-10 and he only won that conference once, in his first year.
But now, he’s not even winning with the frequency that marked his time in UCLA. Maybe the difference is just recruiting, but something changed between Westwood and Pauley Pavilion and the east coast.
It hasn’t changed in four full years of basketball. It didn’t change this year.
That’s why, you have to wonder if Lavin suspended Obekpa because he wanted to send a message and damn the consequences to his future.
A future he already knows should end up somewhere else after the tournament.