Kevin Keatts: "It Will Be A Tough, Tough Game"

NC State head coach Kevin Keatts met with the media to discuss Tuesday night's game against North Carolina.

NOTE: Click the video above to watch the press conference.

What did you hear about this past weekend?
Nothing really, because I isolated myself from most people. As I told you guys at the end of the game, I wanted to watch the tape, and I did. I watched it two or three times, and every time I watched it, it was the same tape. We missed a lot of shots.

It’s crazy because I didn’t think Virginia Tech played that much better than us. At the end of the day, they scored 47 points, but I thought both teams struggled. It was one of the worst games that I’d ever been associated with.

There’s no reason for it. We didn’t make shots. We had great looks. I counted myself; I thought we had 14 wide-open looks that didn’t go down.

What I’ve done with the team is they will never see the tape. I’m hoping that none of you guys will never post it or it be on YouTube. We just want to move past it and just get better from it.

You had three games in a row where teams wanted to slow you down. Now you face one who won’t. Is that the perfect mix for this team right now?
Let’s say this: we’re playing one of the hottest teams, if not the hottest team, in the ACC. Certainly, Virginia’s played well, and Duke has too, but since their first loss to Louisville, they’ve won five in a row, and they’re playing well.

When you go and play against a good Carolina team, especially on their home floor, you know what you have to do. You’ve got to do a great job getting back in transition because they do a great job pushing the ball and scoring in transition, and then they beat you really on the glass.

That’s two of the biggest keys that we have to go by, and we’ve got to get back, and we’ve got to do a great job of blocking out. It will be a tough, tough game. This is, as I said about a week ago, as tough a stretch that I’ve had as the NC State coach in my young career here.

What did you guys do on Sunday in practice?
We got out and shot for about 20 minutes, and then we watched the first half of the Carolina game, and that was our practice.

I wanted to get those guys back out there just to get some shots up so they can feel good about themselves, but I didn’t want to get out there and do too much obviously after playing that game. I wanted to save some legs, so this will be our full practice today.

Did you meet with guys after the game?
I did, and not because of that game. I usually go every week and a half or so and try to meet with guys after a game. I schedule meetings for each guy for about 10 minutes, and we talk about not just that game, their academics, how they’re doing, and what we need to do moving forward as a team.

Any concern or lack of focus they may have going into the UNC game?
I hope not. You don’t know that until you get into the next game, but I would tell you that, watching that tape, I think it’s a different outcome if we make even half of those shots that we missed.

Arguably, my best shooter missed the most, and that was Braxton Beverly. We got good looks after good looks, and it became a trickle-down effect.

When you look at the halftime score, it explains everything to you. Thinking that two teams like to score, the score’s 20-14. Unfortunately, they got a little better in the second half offensively, and we didn’t.

You guys forced a ton of turnovers the last time you faced UNC. Are there positives from that meeting?
When you look at our season and you look at our conference, I’m encouraged about every game that we played other than the Virginia Tech game. If you look at it, even against the best in the country when you talk about UVA, we had our opportunity to win. Against Carolina here, we had an opportunity to win.

People forget that we went on the road for three straight games, and we didn’t have Markell Johnson. I don’t know the outcome if he played or not, but it certainly gives us another opportunity to win some games.

I think every game in this conference, when you play a team a second time, I’ve always said this in my career, I think it’s a totally different game. I don’t know what this game’s going to be.

You had success motivating Markell before. What tricks can you use to get him going?
He’s got to play like a junior. One of the things that I’ve always told him is that if anybody on our team has experience, especially in the ACC, that’s Markell Johnson. He has to play great on both ends of the floor.

He’s got to be a leader. He’s got to be aggressive. He’s one of the best guards in the ACC when he wants to be. I’m trying to get him to be more consistent each night that we play.

Another thing that I tell him is, ‘We need you to be the best version of yourself. We don’t need you to be anybody else.’

I think his timing is off when you think about the time that he took off. He doesn’t have the same conditioning, so he can’t play as hard or for longer stretches. Hopefully, he’ll continue to get that back in these last nine ACC regular season games.

What’s different about UNC now?
I think the number one thing is that they’re starting to play good basketball. It takes teams a little while to get going. When you look at it, I’m sure they were pretty embarrassed by the way they played the last Louisville game.

I think they took a look at themselves, and Roy’s done a great job of motivating those guys, and certainly from that point on, they’ve played great basketball.

How much do you look at guys like Markell or Braxton who know what it takes to win at Syracuse?
I know a lot of people say it’s so much when you win in Chapel Hill, but it’s everywhere. Last year, we had to go to Syracuse, and we got a win. We had to go to Chapel Hill.

It’s just being able to play on the road. You have to have much more focus than at home. You don’t have the home crowd or the electricity in the building on your side. You’ve got to figure a way to play as a team, and you almost have to have that ‘you against the world’ mentality going in.

You’ve had stretches where if the starters were off the bench came through. Do you feel the bench needs some confidence too?
Well, that’s a little tricky because the bench is great depends on who I start. Every guy that hasn’t started, which is pretty good, has come off the bench and been very good. If I want to light a fire under a guy, maybe I should consider bring them off the bench.

Our bench has to be great. One thing that’s lost in Carolina that people don’t talk about is they play a lot of guys also. They’ve got a lot of guys that can play and can contribute and do a good job.

We’ve got to do the same thing. Our guys who come into games have got to be very effective.

Markell had an all-time game in Chapel Hill last year.
The thing that we’ll talk about with him is he played great, but I thought he was on ‘go’ the entire game. He pushed in transition. He did a great job. He did a little bit of everything. He scored the ball where we needed him to. He did a great job of finding people.

When you think about the game last year, I thought Al Freeman was tremendous going 7-for-7 from the three, but a lot of that stuff came from Markell’s play.