Kevin Keatts: "I'm Not Happy With Our Turnovers"
NC State head coach Kevin Keatts met with the media after the Wolfpack's home loss to Virginia Tech.
NOTE: Click the video above to watch the interview.
Opening Statement...
“I give Virginia Tech a lot of credit. I thought that they made big plays when they needed to. I
thought that in the first half we did a really good job on Sean Pedulla and Hunter Cattoor and
then at the end of the game we didn’t. I thought that those guys drove us, they made big plays
when they needed to and had been playing really good basketball. I thought that our defense in
the second half was not very good and the one thing lately that we have got to clean up - that
we haven’t done earlier in the season - is we are turning the ball over. If you look at the way we
played the first half and forced 20 turnovers and did some good things. I just didn’t think that we
did a great job defending. This particular team hasn’t been one of those groups to give up
straight line drives and guys were able to get all the way to the rim on us. Needless to say, I am
not happy with our turnovers and our defense and those are things that we will continue to get
better at.
On Turnovers..
“It’s weird because w’;ve been good the entire season of just taking care of the basketball and
then the last couple of games, we haven’t and we’ve got to get back to doing that. It’s funny
because we’re still winning the turnover battle but we were winning it by such a large margin.
Even though they turned it over 20 times I didn’t think we capitalized on all of those. I thought
we gave it back a little bit.”
On the defense in the second half...
“I didn’t think we were as aggressive as we were in the first half, you remember the first half,
Jayden Taylor really got after [Sean] Pedulla. We were that aggressive late in the second half
with two minutes on the clock when it looked like we had a chance, we ramped it up. I thought
early in the second half, we just kind of let those guys get comfortable and once they got
comfortable, they started playing really good basketball. Those two guys were on the top of our
scouting report and we ended up giving [Hunter] Cattoor 19, I know he got 8 of them from the
free throw line but they drove us. And that’s the disappointment that we haven’t had many
games where I could tell that defensively we were not very good but that particular half, this
second half, we were not very good and our defense has really saved us the entire year.”