As one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history, St. John's Rick Pitino has seen it all. While not typically a fan of how NBA teams defend, Pitino offered one of his greatest compliments to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

One day after the Thunder clinched the NBA Finals with a Game 5 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, Pitino praised the team's suffocating defense on X, formerly Twitter. The 72-year-old St. John's coach said Mark Daigneault's defense is the only one he has ever shown any of his teams during film sessions in his four-decade-long career.

“It's interesting, in my 40+ years I've never shown clips to my teams of NBA defense,” Pitino tweeted. “Offensive sets and individual moves, but never a defense. Until this season. We watched the Thunder at least 3x a week. Their switching, loading up to help, and rotations are awesome. And they are still so young!!!”

Pitino tweeted his praise after Oklahoma City held Minnesota to just 94 points in its closeout victory. The Timberwolves averaged 113.6 points per game in the regular season, but only reached that mark once in five games against the Thunder.

The Thunder held teams to 107.3 points per game in the regular season, the third-best in the league. Their aggressive, switchable defense forced the most turnovers. They also ranked first in score margin while allowing the fewest opponent points in the paint, opponent fastbreak points and the lowest opponent shooting percentage.

Thunder defense helped Rick Pitino, St. John's basketball

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Showing his team clips of the Thunder's defense evidently helped Pitino turn St. John's into a premier defensive team in college basketball. The Red Storm thrived on that end of the court in 2024-2025, relying on their defense to propel them to a national championship.

St. John's allowed just 65.8 points per game in 2024-2025, the 25th-best in the country. It outscored opponents by an average of 12.7 points per game, the ninth-best point margin. Like the Thunder, the Red Storm energized themselves by forcing turnovers, causing opponents to cough the ball up at the ninth-highest rate in Division I.

Pitino's squad included the likes of defensive aces Kadary Richmond, RJ Luis Jr., Zuby Ejiofor and Deivon Smith. St. John's had six players average over one steal per game, led by Richmond's 2.0 takeaways per contest.