Keatts: 'I Need To Get Everyone Back on the Same Page'
In the span of just one short week, the NC State basketball team has gone from a hot team on the rise up the ACC standings to a struggling team in the process of putting itself onto the wrong side of the NCAA tournament bubble for the second straight year.
Losses to Georgia Tech on Saturday and rival North Carolina on Monday have clearly frustrated Wolfpack Coach Kevin Keatts, whose team now stands at 14-7 overall (5-5 in the ACC) at the midway point of the conference schedule.
Here is what Keatts had to say about the loss to the injury-riddled Tar Heels and what it means in the big picture:
“I thought (UNC's) Garrison Brooks was tremendous tonight. If you look at his stat line, he had 25 points, 11 rebounds, six offensive rebounds. I thought he completely kicked our butt. Add in the fact that Armando (Bacot) played well. Between the two of those guys they had 36 points and 22 rebounds.
"I thought we lost the game with mental and physical toughness inside the paint. We gave up too many offensive rebounds. I thought we missed out on free throw boxouts. When we made our run with about 10 minutes left in the game and went 5 for 6, we couldn’t get stops when we needed to. That was a big difference in the game.
“Give those guys a lot of credit. We've got to get tougher. Some of my better players are not playing very good basketball, meaning that we're not shooting the ball well. That's something we've got to get in the gym and get better on. When you look at us from the 3-point line, we were 4-20. I had a guy go 0 for 1, 0 for 5, 0 for 3, 0 for 4 and that's not a good formula for us to be successful, regardless of who we are playing.
"So we've got to get better, which I will take as a coach. We are halfway through our season. We're 5-5 in the ACC. We have 10 games left and we have to figure it out pretty quick.”
Although Manny Bates was back after missing the previous two games while in concussion protocol, he didn't start -- prompting a member of the media to ask Keatts why, especially in light of the fact that State's opening matchup with the smaller Jericole Hellems trying to guard UNC's 6-9 Brooks inside didn't work out well.
“He's ready to play, but he's not ready to play. He's only a shell of himself. He did a great job on the defensive end with five blocks, but he can’t go long stretches. So I wanted to bring him off the bench. My idea was to play him 12 minutes, but when Jericole (Hellems) got in foul trouble I think we got up to 16 to 17 minutes. Hopefully in the next couple of days, he will get his conditioning back and he'll be more ready to play against Louisville. Right now he wasn’t ready to go anymore than 15 or 16 minutes.”
As for C.J. Bryce's shooting slump (he went 0 for 8 and has missed his last 12 shots while going scoreless for two straight games), Keatts said the only thing he knows for sure is that he needs his senior leader to start making some again ...
“I think he's got to get in the gym and see the ball go in. I've coached him for three years and I don’t think he has ever had a stretch of games where he's gone 0 for 12. I didn’t think he was aggressive at all at Georgia Tech. As a matter of fact,I thought he passed up on a lot of shots. Tonight I thought he came out very aggressive, it just didn’t go down. So I'm going to stick with him. We've got to get him better.
"We've got to figure it out, because CJ is a big part of who we are. We've become so reliant on him, so when you take out his 15 to 16 points, we're a totally different team.”
A major turning point in the game came in the final five seconds of the half, when Danny Dixon fouled UNC's Armando Bacot as he was scoring, then failed to box out Brooks on the rebound of Bacot's missed free throw -- allowing Brooks to score and turn a tie game into a four-point deficit going into halftime.
It was a turn of events that clearly bothered Keatts ...
"Going into the half, we missed the free-throw blockout. I had Danny Dixon and D.J. Funderburk in and it kind of changed the game. We should have went into half up one or down one and we didn't We were down four because we missed the free throw blockout.
"I'll take full responsibility for that. We've got to get back to doing the little things. Those two (UNC) guys inside really kicked our butt. As I told the guys inside the locker room, we have get better real quick because the post guys from Louisville are just as good as the guys as we played against tonight.”
Keatts was asked how delfating the two straight losses are after the team appeared to be picking up momentum only a week earlier ...
“I’m not to the point where I'm saying it’s deflating. We've got to get better and we've got to get everyone back on the floor and everyone healthy and everybody on the same page Obviously we're not there. When you have so many guys that miss for whatever reason, CJ Bryce missed a lot of games, Manny (Bates) has missed some games, so we're not clicking on all cylinders, You would hope that you would be, since we’re almost into February, But our issue is our issue. We’ve had some guys who've been out.
“For this first time ever I’ve had a couple of guys out with concussions and all that other stuff. It’s part of the game, I understand. These aren’t excuses. But in order for us to get better, I've got to get everybody back on the same page and everybody playing good basketball. We have probably two guys playing good basketball right now. DJ is one of them, Markell has his moments, Devon (Daniels) played well tonight. But we don’t have three or four or five, which we need in order to be successful.”
Keatts was asked what's been the difference in his team since it went up to Virginia and gritted out a tough road win there ...
“We made shots at Virginia. When you get into those situations where , if you look at the Virginia game, Jericole Hellems made a big three, Markell Johnson made a big three, CJ made a big pull up. What we have to figure out is when those shots don’t go down, now you've got to figure out how to win the game off a big rebound, a big stop or those type of things.
“That's a great win for us, but we can’t live on that game. We've got to move forward. When our shots are not going down and we don’t have guys making late shots, that’s what we've got to get better at. That’s what I need to help them at, that’s what we all as a staff and as a program have to get better in those situations.
"We didn’t finish the Georgia Tech game and this game we had our chances. We were right there. Everything we thought would happen was happening up to that point and we had that stretch with our run, we couldn’t get stops. We couldn’t get an extra rebound. We lost guys, we broke down and a lot of that was just mental fatigue.”
With half the ACC schedule still remaining, Keatts said he's not ready to give up on his team or its NCAA tournament chances. But he acknowledged that things have to change quickly with the Wolfpack's most difficult games still to come:
"First of all, we've got to take one game at a time. There’s a lot of basketball to be played and honestly we've got a lot of teams that can determine our fate whether we win or lose those games. We've got some really good teams at home that are coming in here to the PNC and then we've some guys on the road.
"But we need to fix our issues with mental and physical toughness if we want to win those games. That’s what it’ll come down to. On any night, any team in this league can beat you. But the fortunate thing is this year you can beat anyone as well. We've got a couple things we need to clean up. We’ll take tomorrow off, I told everyone to look themselves in the mirror and we’ll come back on Wednesday, we'll go to work and we'll get better.”
