Kevin Keatts: "I Love Our Guys' Fight"
NC State head coach Kevin Keatts met with the media following the Wolfpack's 63-59 loss to Texas Wednesday evening in the 2024 SEC/ACC Men's Challenge, presented by Continental Tire.
NOTE: Click on the video in the player above to watch Keatts’ press conference. An abbreviated transcript is provided below.
Opening Statement
What a hard-fought battle against a really good Texas team. It felt like one of those late February ACC games where both teams were playing extremely hard and really wanted it. It was a defensive battle. I thought, if you look at us on the night, we did some really good things. I thought at the end of the game, we had a couple of careless turnovers. We missed a very crucial block and then we got to make our free throws. We went 6-for-14 and at the end when it's a one-possession game, I certainly loved our guy's fight. We don't take moral victories in this program but at the end of the day we do have a lot of things we can build on. I thought starting with the big lineup we did some good things with that but I was very happy to see Dontrez Styles come off the bench and put the ball in the hole. We didn't have everyone play well but we had some guys that made some plays down the stretch but in a possession game we can't go 6-for-14 from the free throw line.
On Jayden Taylor’s last play of the game...
We wanted to bring Jayden Taylor off of some stagger screens and turn the corner to get to the rim if we could. We didn't want to settle for three and the second option was to pan in for Dontrez Styles to get a shot off. I thought Jayden did a good job to drive the ball and honestly, I thought it was contact in the restricted area. We were always taught if there is contact in the restricted area you got a chance to go to the free throw line and we didn't.
On losing three in a row and adjusting for the future...
I think we lost to three really good teams, but our focus will still be on making the right decisions. Our focus will also be to continue to work on not giving up offensive rebounds. I've said this from day one on this team, we can't have a couple guys have bad games. When you look at it, we had a couple in these three loses. We had a couple of guys not play well and we’ve got to figure out what do we do when one or two guys don't play well.