NC State head coach Will Wade met with the media after the 108-72 win over Texas Southern.
When you guys wear “State” jerseys, you're shooting 45%.. are you superstitious?
I'm not superstitious, but competition also has something to do with it.
Well, how would you evaluate tonight? Offense, defense, overall?
It's fair. I mean, obviously, Paul was phenomenal. Defensively, not very good. But I thought Paul was great, especially getting us off to a good start with a working margin and then playing from there. In the first half, they missed 16 shots, they had eight offensive rebounds. Posey was at Northwestern State last year.
My team at McNeese started a bit better than we did. He was at Northwestern State. My front line at frickin' McNeese could block him out. He got five of their eight offensive rebounds in the first half. He had six last time I checked. I don't know what he ended with. What did he end with? Six. Yeah.
But, I mean... I thought Scottie brought an edge to us. I thought he helped us. But, not good enough. Same guys, we make mistakes in shoot-around, who make the same mistakes in practice, make the same mistakes in the game. Same guys who foul all the time because they have no attention to detail and they make mistakes and they just act all shocked when they foul in the game. It's what we do.
You spoke about Paul a little bit right there, but when a player like that is hot and you're seeing that, you're recognizing that, how does that kind of help the team kind of rise up in a way? And how do you kind of assess what was going on with him in his game today?
It's pretty simple. You just go to this play sheet with all the calls for him and start dialing them up. But, he was great. He was eight for 40 the last five games coming into this one. So, it was good to see him break out of that. Stayed after yesterday at work.
He stayed extra. Everybody else went home. He was in the gym by himself. It was JoJo and him and myself just sitting there. He worked for an extra 45 minutes after our meal last night. So, you get what you earn. You get what you deserve. You get what you work on. And I'm proud of Paul.
Coach, you seem a little disappointed with tonight's performance.
Yeah, I mean, give up the amount of points we gave up. Offensive rebounds we gave up. Just our attention to detail is lacking. Our effort, our intensity on a consistent basis on every possession is not where it needs to be. So, we got to get that fixed and quickly before Sunday because we're going to play Ole Miss on Sunday. It was a great team. Well-coached, physical, tough. We've got great players. Malik Dia, an all-SEC-level player.
AJ Storr’s being able to score everywhere. Wisconsin and Kansas. Now Ole Miss. They got a kid they brought in from France who's phenomenal. So, I mean, it's going to be a really, really tough game on Sunday. A lot of the mistakes, a lot of the stuff we do here, not going to cut it on Sunday.
You talked about it in your introductory press conference, but what was it like to coach here?
It was awesome. Great atmosphere. Really, really cool environment. So, I loved being over here. It was fun being here the last couple of days. It’s been really cool. So, we appreciate Coach Moore letting us rent the place out a little bit. Let us use their film room the last couple of days. So, very, very appreciative of the women for letting us come over here. It was really, really neat.
You mentioned Paul staying after last night. What's it like for you as a coach to see a guy get rewarded for his work and have a game like this?
You love it. Paul doesn't complain. A lot of guys like to complain. He never complains. He just goes to work, figures it out. That's why I always stick with him. I make changes, but I usually stick with him because I trust his work. I trust who he is.
And, look, I mean, he's going to struggle some, but he's going to have more good nights for us than bad nights. There was a little bit of a slump, and I'm just happy to see him get out of it. He got out of it in grand fashion. But I'm very happy with him. He works hard. Very, very diligent.
Does what we ask him to do. And, very proud. He deserves that. He deserves that.
What people don't know is there was a concert in town before the scrimmage against South Carolina, the exhibition, the one where he hit the buzzer beater. While all the rest of the guys were at the concert, Paul was in the gym working.
Not surprising he hit the game winner. Everybody was like, oh my God, you drew the game winner up for Paul. Well, yeah, no joke. He was the only guy in there working. Everybody else was at the NBA Youngboy concert. It's cool.
You can go to the NBA Youngboy concert. I'm cool with that. But that's what you get.
That's how Paul is. That's why I trust him. That's why I love him.
Is that why you've tried different starting lineups just to see if you can get some effort from different guys?
Well, today, Darrion was out. It’s not like we got a flotilla of bigs, so we don't have a whole lot of options. Terrance has been sick as a dog. He was out for the last couple of days. He just put on a uniform tonight and tried to use some minutes. And he's been sick.
I pulled Jerry off the shelf. He hadn't played much the last couple of games. But him, 22 minutes.
Alyn's been solid for us. So, we'll just change it around a little bit and see what we got. I mean, some of these bench guys want to play more, but you put them in, you see why they don't play. Look at them out there and you see the scoreboard go the other way.
Well, how do you, how do you get the consistency that you need?
We're going to keep demanding it. It'll break eventually.
What was Texas Southern doing to limit the paint touches?
We shot a bunch of threes. We shot a ton, we shot a ton of threes, but most of them were pretty good shots. But I mean, we took, I mean, think about some of the, some of the threes we took. But the, I mean, it's mind numbing some of the threes we take. And, and, it's mind numbing.
So, but, well, Texas Southern was good. I mean, Posey's tougher than most of the guys we got on our front line. And, they're physical and we couldn't guard them one-on-one, but they did a pretty good job guarding us one-on-one, keeping us out of the paint.
We couldn't turn a corner on them, but they were right by us. They just missed a bunch of corner threes. I mean, they whipped us on the baseline. We're whipping it. We changed our ball screen coverage two different times. We just, I mean, into the, into the, one point, one point three on the shot clock. They run the X play. We get, we get slipped in front of, we went over that eight times and shoot around the day, screwed it up six times. So we had to go over it eight times.
And then all of a sudden, boom, layup. Not prepared on a baseline out of bounds on the far end in the second half, layup and one. That shit gets you beat. That's five points we gave up on the baseline out of bounds. Now, today we actually screened for the first time all year in baseline out of bounds and Paul got two open threes off the baseline out of bounds play. It's amazing.
When you screen, you get open. Unbelievable. But, the attention to detail on that stuff, like that stuff, it's fine.
We beat Texas Southern, but that's the sort of stuff that's why we hadn't been able to beat Kansas, why we hadn't been able to beat Auburn, why we hadn't been able to beat these guys, is because we make those same mistakes in those games and they kill us. And we, and we don't get it corrected. And I'm tired of it. I'm absolutely tired of it.
I'm not mad at y'all.
Sorry, Coach. Scottie got in there and gave you good minutes on both ends.
Scottie plays with an edge. I'm the dumbass for not playing him. I should play him more. I mean, he, he, hey, when he's in there, we got, we got a lot of guys that go in there and are neutral. They're like, they're walking around on eggshells, trying not to do something or whatever. Hey, when he's in there, something's going to happen.
Somebody's band's playing. Ours are theirs, but somebody's playing. Something is going to happen. And, and, and that's, that's, that's a good thing. That's a good thing when, when, when he's in there. We got to put him in around the medias. We need to put him in around the medias. 45 minute spurts. Let him go in there and, and, and wreck things up.
But he, I mean, he played 13 minutes, fouled out tonight. That's what he does. That's what he does. Made a free throw. That's what he does. He brings a physicality to us. I mean, hey, in the first half, that weak side block, yeah, that's the first weak side block we've had all year. We just watch him lay it in.
Talk about Kansas, the Kansas game, we got out of the way in the last six minutes of the game. We got out of the way of three shields that should have been blocks. That's what lost us the game. Not all the other stuff. And Scottie’s, he's the only guy we got that can come from the weak side and make the block off of a shield. We hadn't done that all year long. 11 games into the year, haven't done it. Scottie comes in, boom, like volleyball. Backs that thing all over the place.
How do you get the rest of the team to play with that kind of intensity and physicality?
You see, it's tough. It's tough. We got a lot of nice guys. We got a great team GPA. We got all that stuff. Over 3.0. We got all that stuff. It's wonderful. We're running a daycare. We're running a competitive Division I college basketball coach. I am in academics. I was a teacher. I'm happy about 3-2.
But we're running a competitive basketball program. And quite frankly, I've been trying to get some urgency and some internal leadership. And I think Q's done a pretty good job. Outside of Q and Ven, those guys are playing about as well as we can ask them to play. We take on the personality. We got a lot of casual personalities on our team. We don't have people that are revved up and ready to go.
I had one of the kids come to me, and he said, I'm tough, I'm tough. I said, shit, you're not in the top 50 of the toughest players I've coached. Not in the top 50. I don't want to hear that. You ain't tough. You wouldn't make the top 50. You would make the top 25 of the last five years of who I've coached. And I sat out a year. I mean, I don't want to hear that.
When you’ve got casual guys, I mean, it's tough. It's tough. But I did think Ven and Q took a step forward with their leadership. But like today in our shooter round, we made 88 mistakes in our shooter round. I chart all of it. We made 88 mistakes in our shooter round. We made 23 defensive errors, 13 offensive execution errors. 36. 36 on those. The other ones were different. 36 errors on those.
Our first team made 14. Our second team made 22. How the hell can you be on the second team and watch the first team do it and make eight more mistakes? You're running the same stuff. Casual. Lack of attention to detail. Lack of focus.
And that's great when you have somebody that sets the ACC record for made threes and the school record for made threes. But we're relying on hope that one of these cats is going to go ballistic every night. That's what we rely on. Just hope. And hope's a bad strategy in my book.
Is it concerning that it's taking this long to get things going?
It ain't going. Shit, it's concerning it's taking this long and we're not there. And we got all high major games from here on out. Kindergarten's over. We got all high major games from here on out. I mean, yeah, it's concerning. I played some of those kids and I made their Christmas. It's going to be miserable for me. I made their Christmas. They got a Christmas present a week early.
Played some of these guys. But I mean, yeah. Yeah, it is. I've been concerned for weeks. I've been concerned for weeks. But, I mean, we are who we are. I said it a couple weeks ago. If you're not physical and you're not tough you better be alert and aware. And we're still none of the four.
We're not physical. We're not tough. We're not alert. We're not aware. If you're alert and aware you don't give up five points on baseline out of bounds plays with the clock under three seconds. You just don't do it. You just don't do it. Our goal every game is to win baseline and sideline out of bounds by six plus. We never do it.
We may not tonight because we actually executed our imbalance plays. But we just don't do it. I mean, it's beyond concerning. I mean, concerns like here. This is like a problem. Major problem.
We'll see. We got to have some internal leadership. That's what we got to have. We got to have internal leadership. We got to have urgency. We got to have intensity. We got to have effort on every possession. We have to dominate possessions. Dominate possessions. And we just get through possessions. Just hold on for dear life in possession.
