How Rick Pitino experimented with transfer portal at St. John’s — and won

SAN DIEGO – Much like Deion Sanders in football, Rick Pitino has developed a bit of a reputation for himself in this new era of men’s college basketball.

He’s a Hall of Famer who pioneered the art of flipping a team roster and becoming king of the transfer portal, following a blueprint similar to the one used by Sanders, the football coach at Colorado.

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The big difference so far is sustained results. Pitino has revived St. John’s with three straight winning seasons, including a second straight NCAA Tournament appearance, this time as a No. 5 seed here against Northern Iowa on Friday, March 20.

“We don’t build through the high school ranks,” Pitino said Thursday. “We build through the portal. And we keep the ones we want coming back, and the ones that want to leave should leave.”

More: How Rod Strickland took LIU from college basketball’s worst team to March Madness

If that sounds familiar, Sanders said something like it when he was hired at Colorado in December 2022. He told his inherited players to “go ahead and jump in that portal” to make way for change.

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Pitino effectively did the same when hired at St. John’s in March 2023. He brought in 10 transfer players and two freshmen on a roster of 14 that finished with a 20-13 record but fell short of the NCAA Tournament.

Check him out now. He revived a dormant program and could make a run in the tournament at age 73, largely due to this peculiar roster-building strategy.

How Rick Pitino built his St. John’s roster

Pitino has landed one of the nation’s top-five transfer classes the past two years, including the nation’s No. 1 transfer class with seven players in 2025-26, according to 247Sports. One of them was Ian Jackson, a guard who ranked second in the team in scoring at North Carolina (11.9 points per game) before transferring to St. John’s.

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“I came here to learn,” Jackson told USA TODAY.

That’s a common refrain among transfer recruits. Pitino has won more than 900 games in college, in addition to having coached in the NBA.

“When I came on my visit, I was star-struck, like I was meeting a…

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Publish date : 2026-03-20 00:44:00

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