NC State head coach Will Wade met with the media to discuss the 78-74 loss to Georgia Tech.
NOTE: Click the video above to watch the interview!
On getting off to a good start coming off a “bye week”...
We just haven't been very consistent. It's kind of been the story of our team as two steps forward, one step back.
I didn't feel like we had the best use of the off week. I've kind of sensed that. It's just been disappointing.
We can't ever get into any sort of rhythm or get any momentum, which has been a major issue.
Coach, you guys seem to struggle a little bit, especially rebounding. What did you notice from your perspective there?
We struggled rebounding. We also struggled to finish. We missed a ton of layups at the rim, but their length, that's something to do with that.
But we missed, I mean, just in the second half alone, we missed five, basically point-blank layups. But, they made a difficult force, and they were very physical with us, so we had to exert a lot of energy to get the ball into the paint. And then once we got there, we didn't finish off possessions.
The last part's got to be the strongest part when you have those possessions. We just weren't able to finish those off. It made it difficult for us.
I think a lot of it was that it took so much effort to get down there. We just couldn't finish them because we had to exert so much effort to get the ball to where we were going.
Coach, how pivotal was the foul shooting in this one today?
We didn't shoot it well. They didn't shoot it very well from the free-throw line either.
They were 50%, I think. We were, we missed a lot of critical ones in the six-minute game that would have given us a chance to close the gap and do some things, and we just didn't finish it.
Some coaches are fearful after you play as well as you did against Florida State. It's tough to repeat that kind of effort. Most coaches, though, as Damon said, after they played the way that they did against Pitt, he kind of knew they would have a little bit of a bounce back.
Did you kind of fear the spot you were in today? He also kind of mentioned the week off for you guys.
Yeah, I mean, I was worried all week. I was about the only one on the team who was worried. But, yeah, I was worried all week.
Coming off the off week, new tip-off. It was the same spot Florida State was in last week. And, we didn't handle it very well.
We did our game on Tuesday, and we did the start of the game and had to restart the game on Tuesday because we couldn't start well against our scout team. So that's problematic, and that carries over. That carries over.
But just give them credit. They messed up some layups to start the game against Pitt. They had some tough things happen to them against Pitt, and then they were able to bounce back and play with some physicality and really show us a fight.
So Coach Stoudamire did a great job having his group ready to go and playing super hard.
Will, it seems like this year you tried to push a lot of different buttons to get this team to play their best. Why do you think it's been such a struggle to find that consistency?
Yeah, I wish I knew. If I knew, we would be a little bit more consistent. But with this team, it's been two steps forward, one step back, and every, you know, maybe three steps forward, one step back. We're talking about this, so we're talking about losses, but also just in terms of like how we play, how we prepare.
We just haven't been able to hit a stride and have any consistency. And so it's been a real challenge, usually. We've had teams that are reel off 8, 10, 12 straight almost every year.
That ain't going to be this group. So we've just got to – we're going to have to, grit it out as best we can and try to – this is not a team that's like a rocket ship that's just going to shoot up. I mean, we're going to kind of level off and go back, and this is kind of how it's been.
Anticipate that, and I haven't done a good enough job of getting us to be able to take off.
Just to follow up on a different point, Quadir didn't want to talk about the exchange you guys had in the first half. You did finish strong in the layup right after that, but is there anything you can elaborate on about what the interactions were?
I don’t even remember.
It was right before the end of the half, I think you told them, stop talking.
So much stuff goes on in the game. I'm not sure.
You just go down as a quad four loss. It's not necessarily – it's not an indictment necessarily on this season, but is there anything specific that you –
It's going to be hard to recover from. You lose a home game like this, I mean, it's hard to recover from. I appreciate you trying to make it seem a little nicer than it is, but I mean, this is – I mean, look, our resume wasn't great to begin with, but the best part of our resume is we didn't have any bad stuff on it. It was pretty clean.
We didn't have any quad one wins. We didn't have any three or four losses either. We had a bunch of quad two wins.
Well, now the best part of our resume is blemished. So, I mean, we're going to have to punch above our weight class a couple of times here to get this thing back where it needs to be.
Was there anything different that maybe you want to – or is there going to be a different approach at all going forward?
I mean, we'll see. I mean, you've got to look at everything, but we'll look at it and just kind of see what we need to do moving forward. We need to do – I need to do a better job of putting our guys in better positions, and so we'll look at the film and look at where we are and see what we can do to put ourselves in a better position to play well on Tuesday.
How do you make sure that this loss doesn't spiral into something worse when you have a tough game at Clemson coming up?
We'll see. We'll see if we can respond. I can't guarantee that's going to happen.
I can't guarantee with this group that that's how we're going to respond. I don't know. I don't know.
So I wish I could, but I'm not sure. Hopefully we have at other times this year.
