Momentum again hard to find as NC State staggers through basketball season
All Kevin Keatts could do at the end was shrug. He fist-bumped Tony Bennett. He waved to the Virginia bench. He wandered off the court Wednesday night having played whatever cards he had left only to fall short yet again.
N.C. State had its moments -- and got just about all it could ask from Jericole Hellems -- but was well short of perfect against Virginia, and only perfection will do for the Wolfpack at this point as it staggers through a season that’s gone off the rails due to circumstances generally, although not entirely, beyond the Wolfpack’s control.
Such is the Wolfpack’s lot in life at the moment, ever since Devon Daniels’ knee buckled against Wake Forest. Things hadn’t exactly been going well at that point -- as it turns out, the Wake game is N.C. State’s only win in the past seven after a 6-1 start -- but the road ahead only got harder then. Daniels had blossomed, late in his career, into a versatile, dangerous and increasingly efficient scorer, only for fate to intervene.
Throw in whatever violation of university policy kept DJ Funderburk out of the Syracuse loss, and that’s a lot of talent removed from the equation. As mysterious as that infraction remains, Funderburk’s unexplained absences Wednesday were equally hard to explain: his mind was somewhere else in the first half, but he awakened in the second half only to spend all but the final seconds of the last six minutes and change on the bench watching Virginia expand a one-point lead into a 64-57 win. Coach’s decision, Keatts said afterward, briskly.
“It’s just learning for us,” Braxton Beverly said. “We played a good game. We played a hard-fought game. There’s a couple mistakes we just got to fix. It’s something that’s fixable. The way this season’s went, all the adversity everybody on this team has had to go through in terms of COVID and missing people and DJ sitting out and injuries and people playing through injuries, it’s hard. But the good news is we can learn from this.”
It’s been a long season of one step forward and two steps back for N.C. State, disrupted by two separate COVID pauses and Daniels’ season-ending ACL tear and now the Funderburk drama. Last year, the Wolfpack was in good shape heading into the ACC tournament and felt pretty good about its chances to upset Duke in the quarterfinals, only for Duke president Vincent Price to pull the plug on the whole shebang hours before the game. The year before, the Wolfpack’s nonconference schedule kept it out of the NCAA tournament, although it would only have taken an extra win or two to make schedule strength moot.
Last year’s team had erratic moments down the stretch, but with wins over Wisconsin and Virginia and Duke there was a sense that the Wolfpack could beat anyone (or lose to anyone, but still), only to be denied any opportunity to make a run by this pandemic that tore asunder the very fabric of our lives. As for this season, the list is long, and other than Funderburk’s policy violation, whatever he did, there really aren’t that many fingers to point.
The pandemic is an uncontrollable constraint that affects everyone, like the weather. The Wolfpack just had the bad fortune to get wet. Twice. Daniels’ knee injury wasn’t because of a hard foul or even a wet spot on the floor. His knee just gave out. Without him, the N.C. State backcourt beyond Hellems is either too young or too limited to threaten anyone in the ACC, even in a down year like this.
It’s hard to get any traction when the ground keeps falling out from under you.
“It’s frustrating,” Keatts said. “I’d be the first to tell you the kids are frustrated. I’ve stayed away from asking those guys how they feel, but it’s tough. it’s something everybody’s going to go through. It’s an unusual year. We’re going to have ups and downs, but we’ve got a lot of basketball still to play.”
Wednesday, against Virginia, the Wolfpack got 23 points from Hellems and kept things close until those final six minutes, when the Cavaliers finally pulled away. There were some bad shots and defensive lapses, but all too predictable from the group on the floor, without Daniels, with Funderburk benched, with young guards learning new roles through painful experience.
The Wolfpack had a chance to beat the presumptive ACC favorite, but that’s all it was. Another chance that slipped away, another step back instead of forward.
This story was originally published February 3, 2021 at 11:59 PM.
