How Shamorie Ponds became the basketball king of New York

Maybe it’s because of the pick-up games on the cracked courts of Brooklyn or the battles for pride and supremacy in New York City public schools. Maybe it’s an unrivaled confidence in his own talent or the quiet faith that comes from all those hours of extra work in the gym.

Shamorie Ponds is in the zone right now, but he’s barely willing to acknowledge it. This torrid scoring pace, these remarkable wins against the sport’s biggest heavyweights, will impress everyone else before it impresses himself.

“I feel like I was always capable of this,” Ponds told SB Nation. “I was always confident in my game. It’s nothing new to me.”

Ponds is walking off the court minutes after keeping college basketball’s most confounding winning streak alive for another game, this time against DePaul. St. John’s had lost its first 11 Big East games, looking like a program in ruins in Chris Mullin’s third season. That’s when Ponds started to cook.

Duke was St. John’s next opponent, with the bright lights of Madison Square Garden providing a perfect backdrop for Ponds’ emergent star turn. He dropped 33 points in a stunning win, icing the Blue Devils down the stretch with a parade of pull-up jumpers. Ponds’ encore was just as spectacular: 26 points and five assists in a road win over No. 1 Villanova, a game KenPom gave the Johnnies just a 3 percent chance to win. Jay Wright immediately called him one of the best one-on-one players in the country.

The next game saw Ponds put up the gaudiest numbers of his career, a 44-point explosion against Marquette that required only 23 field goal attempts. By the time he was torching DePaul in crunch time to pull out a fourth straight win for St. John’s, his 26-point, 10-assist performance barely felt as exceptional as it objectively was.

Over the last five games, Ponds is averaging 32 points on 59 percent shooting from the field and 48.6 percent shooting from three. He’s splashing jumpers and slashing to the basket in a way that would make his boyhood idol Allen Iverson proud. He is almost single-handedly resuscitating the St. John’s program, yes, but it feels bigger than that.

In a way, Ponds is carrying a city’s legacy of flashy guard play into the present. To hear him tell it, he’s just getting started.

Chris Mullin saw a kindred spirit the first time he met Ponds. Both were Brooklyn boys who viewed the game as a route to a better life. As a pre-teen, Ponds was scared to leave the house for days after watching someone get shot in front of him. By the time he was a high school senior, he was winning PSAL titles in New York and establishing himself as a top-50 national recruit.

Mullin’s goal was to bring the best players in the city back to St. John’s. Ponds didn’t want to go anywhere else. It was the perfect marriage of a program that needed a hometown savior and a player who wasn’t afraid to embrace those expectations. When Ponds committed, it was the first sign that Mullin’s vision for bringing the Johnnies back to respectability might just work.

It was always going to be a massive undertaking. St. John’s faced almost unprecedented roster turnover after Steve Lavin’s departure following a 21-win season in 2015. Mullin essentially had to field an entirely new rotation, with St. John’s losing its top six scorers from the year before.

When Ponds got to school, the Red Storm were coming off an eight-win campaign in Mullin’s debut season. Ponds provided hope. He teamed with Marcus LoVett to give St. John’s a dynamic freshman backcourt and led the team in scoring 17 points per game. St. John’s won 14 games, but there was still so much work to do.

It looked like that progress had completely stalled this season. LoVett only played seven games because of a strange mix of injuries and family drama, and has since announced he’s leaving the program. It didn’t help a rotation that was already painfully thin. Meanwhile, St. John’s was dropping game after game in the Big East, often coming close but falling short in crunch time.

After a blowout loss to DePaul on Jan. 6, Ponds put the onus on himself:

A game against No. 6 Xavier on Jan. 30 felt like a turning point. St. John’s again fought admirably and again fell short, but there was a sense something was changing. Ponds was fantastic, finishing with 31 points, five assists, and six steals on 20 shots from the field.

“We’re fortunate to come away with a win,” Xavier coach Chris Mack said. “That might be the best 0-11 team I’ve ever seen anywhere in a conference. Period.”

That was the last time St. John’s lost.

Everyone knows Shamorie Ponds is going left, but they still can’t stop him. He’s looked quicker this month after playing through a knee injury earlier this season. Ponds is back to being a threat to blow by his opponents, which makes his pull-up game even more deadly.

There is so much craft to his scoring ability. He’s hitting one-footed fadeaways and impossible runners. After suffering through a major shooting slump through most of this season, he’s now raining jumpers. Ponds’ three-point percentage is only 26.4 percent, but that can be attributed at least partially to the injury, fatigue and the general malaise of the Red Storm’s start in conference play. He hit 37.5 percent from deep as a freshman and has made four threes in three of his last four games.

Ponds isn’t just a scorer, either. He has a 30.1 percent assist rate, which ranks No. 77 in the country. He’s also No. 34 in steal rate thanks to his quick hands and ambitious plays on the ball.

NBA scouts are taking notice. Ponds was projected as the No. 34 pick in the 2019 NBA Draft in a recent mock by ESPN. While he doesn’t want to talk about the NBA yet, Ponds is likely to test the waters even if he eventually decides to come back for his junior year.

New York has always produced great guards, but for a variety of reasons very few of them have wanted to stick around recently. Stephon Marbury went to Georgia Tech, Lance Stephenson played for Cincinnati, Sebastian Telfair bounced straight to the NBA. Ponds is in that mold, only for once a hometown program is benefiting from it.

St. John’s needed Shamorie Ponds as badly as he needed St. John’s. Just don’t tell him any of this is a surprise.