NC State head coach Will Wade met with Wolfpack Sports Network to discuss the 81-72 road win over Pittsburgh.
Coach, congratulations, a grinder early, late game. What worked for you to be able to, I think it was finish eight of nine from the field.
We did a good job getting some better mismatches, getting the ball downhill, figured out something against the way they were covering our porch action, which got Paul loose for the three, got Q loose downhill. Then they adjusted on that and we were able to kind of go back to something else that worked a little earlier in the game.
So give our guys credit, we had to do a lot of different things on the fly today and our guys were really good. We got off to a really slow start and quite frankly, not the effort that we would like, but look, we're never gonna apologize for winning and there's a little bit more luck involved in this than you would like, but we're gonna get back to Raleigh as quick as we can and take the win and get ready for Syracuse on Tuesday.
Ten steals in the ball game was really impactful late. You were able to pry the ball away, get some fast breaks, steal some possessions back. You mentioned in pre-game that turnover margin would be important.It was impactful today. You only turned it over eight times yourself.
Yeah, it was huge only to turn it over eight times. I mean, you can't turn over when you give up 23 offensive rebounds. I mean, you give up that amount of, you give up that amount of, oh, 26, I'm sorry, it's 23 at the last media, I'm sorry.I mean, you know, you give up 26 offensive rebounds, you better not turn that thing over and so we were fortunate in that regard and we made some timely shots.
I thought Paul McNeil was huge for us, making some timely shots, making some big shots when we needed them when we got down six and Q did a great job finding a minute transition for that one three in front of our bench and so it was a total team effort and very, very proud of the guys, able to dig it out. We had some foul trouble. We couldn't play through Darian as much as we had been and we still found a way.
You mentioned rebounding 26 offensive boards of 52 in the game. That's a plus 21 margin in total. Break down the rebounding for me this game. Corhen, Siulepa, they're crashing the glass.
Oh, 13 killed us. He's a freshman. I mean, he absolutely killed us. Corhen did a great job. Those guys just annihilated us. It started from the beginning of the game. We didn't set the tone very well at the beginning of the game so it started there and we just did a poor job and they got us on some cross matches. We were supposed to rebound down.
Our guards didn't rebound down. We didn't have nearly enough guard, defensive rebounds and so I thought we were a little bit better in the second half with some of the guards rebounding down but just really poor effort and we've got to get that fixed before Tuesday.
How good was Quadir? This game, 20 points, nine assists. In the ball game, he had three turnovers.
Yeah, we needed him. His usage rate was a little high because Darrion was in that foul trouble so that wasn't really the plan but we had to use him quite a bit and he did a really nice job. There was a couple of ill-advised shots but for the most part, he was really good.
22 of 27 free throws benefited from Pittsburgh. 11 of 25 from the free throw line.
Thank God. Thank goodness they didn't shoot it well. We did shoot it well so it was good for us. That's what we needed.
Thank you, coach. Appreciate your time and your flexibility here. Unique travel circumstances.
Yep, we'll see if we can get into Raleigh here.
