Rick Pitino Landed Keyshawn Hall. St. John’s Portal Win Comes With a Catch.
Rick Pitino got the best scorer left in the transfer portal. Auburn’s Keyshawn Hall committed to St. John’s in late August, and on paper it is the kind of move that turns a good Big East team into a Final Four contender.
Read the fine print, though, and the picture gets complicated fast.
Hall is a 6-foot-7 fifth-year forward who averaged 19.3 points, 7.1 rebounds and 2.6 assists in his final Auburn season on the way to Third Team All-SEC. That is a legitimate first option, not a complementary piece. He can score inside, he can pass out of double teams, and he has played real minutes in the best conference in college basketball.
The problem is that he is currently ineligible. The NCAA was granted a motion to stay the injunction that would have cleared him, and Hall and his attorney are still working through options. Until a court or the NCAA says otherwise, St. John’s has a star on the roster who cannot play.
Pitino Needed This Roster Rebuilt for a Reason
The reason Hall was such a priority is ugly. Donnie Freeman, the Syracuse transfer Pitino landed to anchor the frontcourt, tore his Achilles and will miss the entire 2026-27 season. St. John’s also had a pair of players declared ineligible. That is three rotation-level pieces gone before a game was played.
So the Hall commitment is less a flex and more a patch. A very good patch, but a patch.
That context matters when you look at what everyone else did. North Carolina added guard Terrence Brown. BYU grabbed Michigan State forward Jaxon Kohler. Kentucky landed Mark Mitchell. Those are clean, boring, available-right-now additions. St. John’s swung at the highest-upside name on the board because it had to.
The 5-in-5 Cloud Over Everything
Coaches across the sport are uneasy right now, and it has nothing to do with any one commitment. The NCAA’s looming “5-in-5” eligibility model could release a wave of extra seniors for one more college season, which would flood a portal that is currently running dry at the top.
Nobody knows what next April looks like. Build a roster assuming the portal will be stocked and you might be right, or you might be the coach who passed on a player who never came back around. That uncertainty is why teams overpaid for the last available stars this cycle.
Hall’s own eligibility fight is a small piece of that same legal mess, and college basketball has spent three years learning that these cases can flip in either direction with a single ruling.
So is St. John’s a Final Four team? My answer is no, not as currently constructed.
Pitino is a great coach with a Big East contender, and the Johnnies will win a lot of games. But Final Four teams do not go into March with their two best frontcourt players consisting of one guy on crutches and one guy waiting on a courtroom. Depth wins in that tournament. Injury luck and eligibility luck have to break your way.
If Hall gets cleared before November, revisit this. A healthy, eligible Hall alongside Pitino’s defensive structure is a top-three seed and a real threat to reach the second weekend.
Until then, St. John’s won the portal in a press release. The actual verdict arrives in a courtroom, not on a whiteboard.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
