As losses pile up, NC State coach Kevin Keatts has faith in his team’s fight
Amid a skid that has seen N.C. State lose six of seven and start the ACC season 1-4, with a stirring road upset of Virginia Tech somehow mixed in, Kevin Keatts hasn’t lost faith, and for one main reason.
Fight.
The Wolfpack has lost games by going cold on offense and getting overwhelmed on defense, sometimes alternating between the two, the wicked fruits of youth and inconsistency. But it has also managed to keep things close game after game without being rewarded, almost without exception.
N.C. State may not have many wins, but it has had a lot of chances to win.
Keatts, at this point, will take that.
“The common thread that gets me excited about our team and what we look like, we’re fighting and competing every game,” Keatts said Monday. “You can’t say that about a lot of teams that are struggling right now. But at the end of the day we have a lot of fight and we’re in every game.”
Which sounds like faint praise, or a refuge in moral victories. And to an extent, it is. But that’s also the position the Wolfpack finds itself in at this point. It can’t count on its offense. It hasn’t been able to rely on its defense. But it can count on showing up.
A team this young that lost its best player before the season really even started could easily have folded in the face of a long and difficult ACC season. It has not.
The hope would be that these difficult lessons lead to future success for Dereon Seabron and Cam Hayes and Terquavion Smith and , although in this era of college basketball it may be impossible to keep a roster together long enough to truly benefit. N.C. State’s football team went through this in 2019 – and did not keep things close – and used it as a platform for the ensuing two seasons of success.
With the exception of the truly baffling loss to Wright State and the overtime loss to then-No. 1 Purdue, all six of N.C. State’s other losses have been by single digits, including the four in the ACC. (So have five of N.C. State’s eight wins.) Luck is a measurable and quantifiable basketball statistic, the difference between how you’ve performed and the results you’ve obtained. N.C. State is in the bottom quarter nationally in that category.
That should, in theory, bode well for the Wolfpack going forward — water finding its level and so on — but even if N.C. State were to swing to the opposite end of that spectrum, there’s not a tremendous difference to be made. This team’s limitations are as obvious and apparent as the youthful inexperience that has let it down in the final moments of several games, including Saturday’s loss to Clemson or last month’s home loss to Louisville. N.C. State gets a rematch with the Cardinals on Wednesday.
Once Manny Bates was lost for the season in the opening minute, the Wolfpack lost not only a player with the ability to change the game in the post – certainly more on defense than offense, but even so – but the foundation its entire identity had been built upon.
Bates’ injury deprived an otherwise very young team of a safety net at the rim on defense and an offensive rebounder at the other end. This group’s mistakes on the perimeter, at either end, have been magnified. Whatever can go wrong has gone wrong.
“Each game presents a different problem,” Keatts said. “That is a little frustrating, but I do think we’re improving in a lot of areas.”
N.C. State has plenty of problems, but fight isn’t one. The Wolfpack is still slugging it out. In a season where wins have been scarce, that’s something.
This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 7:30 AM.
