NC State basketball season ends with a thud. What Kevin Keatts said about the future
A basketball season that started with celebration as banners rose in their home arena ended with disappointment for the NC State Wolfpack on Saturday.
In battle of teams with no chance to make the ACC Tournament, Miami rallied from a double-digit deficit, scoring the game’s final 10 points to beat N.C. State 72-70 at Watsco Center in Coral Gables, Florida.
A year after leading the Wolfpack to their first ACC championship since 1987 and first Final Four since 1983, coach Kevin Keatts lamented another close loss that completed a 12-19 season with a 5-15 ACC mark.
“At times when we’re playing well, we’re playing well,” Keatts said in a postgame interview on the Wolfpack Radio Network. “And then, you know, sometimes when we’re not, we start playing as individuals.”
The Wolfpack, along with last-place Miami (7-24, 3-17 ACC) and Boston College (12-18, 4-15 ACC), entered Saturday knowing it would be the last day of its season. For the first time, the ACC Tournament format only invites 15 of the league’s 18 teams so the three teams with the worst regular-season league marks stay home.
That fact left N.C. State with a dramatic fall after it won five games in five days to win the 2024 ACC Tournament.
Having led the Wolfpack to the last two NCAA tournaments, Keatts will immediately begin the job of rebuilding his program once again.
“The first thing we do is we take a deep dive,” said Keatts, N.C. State’s coach since 2017. “I always do. I take some time to get away. You know, few days just to figure out, how can we get better? Obviously, one of our things is where can we get better as a staff? Where can I get better as a head coach? Do we have the right guys in the program? Those type of things. Then, obviously, you have the revenue sharing part of it. How you navigate that part of it?”
On Saturday, the Wolfpack lead for most of the game against Miami, taking a 41-31 halftime lead that grew to 13 when Dontrez Styles hit a 3-pointer on N.C. State’s first possession of the second half.
N.C. State maintained a 70-62 lead on Paul McNeil’s basket with 3:41 to play. But the Wolfpack didn’t score again.
A freshman, McNeil scored 14 points off the bench for N.C. State.
“He’s making shots,” Keatts said. “If he learns how to play on both ends of the court, I think he can be a really good basketball player.”
Playing the final game of his career, Styles scored 24. The only other N.C. State player in double figures was Brandon Huntley-Hatfield with 10 points.
“We didn’t have a lot of guys who scored the ball,” Keatts said. “I thought we played hard. We compete. We didn’t have much to play for, other than obviously coming up here, trying to play for pride, and so you don’t know what you’re gonna get from your team. But I thought we fought, and then we came up a little short at the end.”
That Miami, a Final Four team in 2023, and the Wolfpack, coming off a Final Four run of its own, could wrap up two such poor seasons Saturday is part of modern college basketball, Keatts said during his postgame news conference.
“I think what it can tell you is it can go either way and basketball now is a year-to-year thing,” Keatts said. “There are so many new faces. Guys are transferring. If we get the right amount of NIL and revenue share, things can change.”