St. Johns Wins Holiday Festival

NEW YORK (AP) The Steve Lavin era at St. John's has made it through 10 games and it seems like there have been two very different teams showing up for the Red Storm.

The team that plays solid defense and finds a way to score either on the break or by pounding it down low showed up Tuesday night and it meant an 85-69 victory over Northwestern in the championship game of the Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden.

Dwight Hardy scored 24 points and Justin Brownlee added a career-high 21 and St. John's shot 80 percent from the field in the second half to hand the Wildcats their first loss of the season.

"It is rare to shoot 80 percent in a half so I think our players executed well in two gears, in transition when the opportunity was there and then probing for good looks,'' said Lavin, who made his biggest news as Red Storm coach by signing an eight-man recruiting class that includes six players considered consensus top 100 players. "It was all an indication of sharing the ball. I thought we were crisp, in sync, playing with a high confidence level and our defense picked up in the second half. You put it together and we had a breakthrough. If you keep working there'll be a breakthrough."

The Red Storm came into the Festival off losses to St. Bonaventure and Fordham, games where they blew 20-point leads. The opening 62-57 win over Davidson and the championship seemed to make those losses seem long ago.

"Sometimes we just have breakdowns here and there and today we had less breakdowns and we came up with the win,'' said Brownlee, one of the St. John's players responsible for the outstanding second-half defensive effort against the Wildcats.

John Shurna had 28 points and Drew Crawford added 17 for the Wildcats (8-1), who were trying to match their best start since 1993-94. They entered the game as one of the last nine unbeaten teams in Division I.

Brownlee was assigned Shurna and Dwayne Polee Jr. had Crawford for most of the second half. Shurna, one of the best long-range shooters in college basketball, didn't score over the final 12 1/2 minutes, while Crawford had just five points in the second half, including a 3-pointer with less than a minute to play.

"They did a good job defensively,'' Shurna said. "I think it seemed like they were making every basket. We tried to force some shots here and there and it took us out of our rhythm."

The Red Storm, whose last of 15 Festival titles was in 2005, won their second inseason tournament. Brownlee had his then-career-high of 20 points in the championship game win over Arizona State at the Great Alaska Shootout.

It is the first time St. John's has won two inseason tournaments since Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca led the then-Redmen to wins in the Lapchick Memorial and the Cougar Classic.

Brownlee was named MVP of both of the tournaments.

"I give him a lot of credit. He's a great scorer,'' Brownlee said of Shurna, one of the country's best long-range shooters. ``The best way to deal with players like that is not to let them touch the ball, so I wasn't going to let him get it.''

Northwestern led 40-37 at halftime and it didn't take long for the Red Storm to start hitting almost everything they threw at the basket.

St. John's hit eight of its first 10 shots from the field with a side jumper by Polee giving the Red Storm a 54-51 lead with 11:49 to play. They kept shooting - they finished 16 of 20 from the field in the second half, and the lead kept growing. Justin Burrell, who finished with a season-high 17 points, made it 75-62 with 2:56 left and most of the crowd of 5,583 started celebrating the win.

"It's great knowing we have the support of the fans and student body,'' Polee said. "It gives us the energy to go out and win."

Shurna came into the game shooting 63.6 percent from the field, sixth in the country, and 61.9 from 3-point range, third nationally. He finished 10 for 17 from the field, including 4 of 6 on 3-pointers.

"In the first half we were scoring and they were scoring," Carmody said. ``In the second half they just really wiped us out. We couldn't get anything going. We were absolutely unable to stop them. Eighty percent pretty much tells the whole story. the last 20 minutes they just took control."

Northwestern shot 29.7 percent in the second half (11 of 37).

Lavin, who spent the last seven years working as a television analyst after coaching at UCLA, earned his first win over a Big Ten team since an 87-82 win at Purdue in December 2000. The Boilermakers coach was Gene Keady, Lavin's first boss who now sits next to him on the bench as an adviser.

The win gives St. John's a 2-1 lead in the all-time series with Northwestern. The Wildcats won the last meeting 62-60 in the first round of the 1966 Holiday Festival.