WATCH: Keatts Previews Rematch With Carolina
NC State head coach Kevin Keatts met with the media Monday morning ahead of the Wolfpack’s matchup against North Carolina Tuesday evening.
NOTE: Click the video in the player above to watch Keatts’ press conference.
“We’re hopeful that [Pat Andree] will play tomorrow night. He is doing better. He has not been in live action. I’m going to try to get him into some live action today and even in shoot around tomorrow. He and I got a few shots up yesterday, but he hasn’t done much cutting.”
“They’re good. [Cole Anthony] is a really good basketball player. When you look at Carolina, everybody’s saying, ‘Look at their record,’ but if you look at those last six games that they played, they lost four games by two points or less. It’s a really good basketball team. He’s one of the better point guards in the country and one of the better players in the country. He completely changes them. They become a little bit more offensive-minded with him in the game.”
“No. Absolutely not. Why would you? It’s still Carolina. They’ve got McDonald’s All-Americans. Like I said, when you look at their last six games, and I’ve seen most of them, they had an opportunity to win every game that they were in outside of two of them where they just obviously didn’t play well. It’s four of them that, if the ball bounces a different way, they win the game.”
“We got our butts kicked on the offensive glass. We’ve got to do a way better job than we did here. When you look at [Garrison] Brooks and [Armando] Bacot, they both had 11 offensive rebounds just between the two of them, and as a team, I think it was close to 15. When you’re playing against Carolina, they’re still Carolina. They still hit the offensive glass. They still get out in transition. We’ve got to do a way better job than we did here. I thought they won the toughness battle in the paint against us in round one.”
“I don’t know the answer to that. I thought the Carolina game here was one of our worst games that we played. I don’t know if it was because of the pressure of playing Carolina with everybody putting so much around that, but I will say this: Every team in our league has that one game where they wish they could have back, and that was the game that we didn’t play well. I think our guys will be fine. I don’t know if it’s so much whether we play them there or play them here. We just didn’t play well. We started off the game well. We did some good things, then as the game went along, we fell apart a little bit. I thought they pressed us and trapped us a couple of times early in the game. It kind of changed the game a little bit.”
“I thought Al Freeman was great in that game. He set a record; he went 7-for-7 [from three-point range]. We just played well over there. I don’t know what it is, but if we’re going to have a chance to win this game at Carolina, we’ve got to play a lot better than we played here at home.”
“[Anthony] is a pure point guard, Without him, they play Leaky Black at the point. Leaky’s a really good basketball player, but he’s not as offensive-minded. Cole’s a guy that can go off for 20-plus points, so you have to do a good job with keeping him in front. He’s doing a great job getting into the paint, and he’s got a great pull-up jump shot from 18 feet in out to three[-point range]. They become more dangerous, in my opinion, from the offensive end.”
“I think we’re different. We’re playing with a lot of confidence. We’re coming off a team that won two out of three on the road, and we played one of our better games on the year against Duke. I thought we had our chances against Florida State. I think we’re playing as a more confident unit. We’re starting to get a little bit more healthy. Guys are starting to come together. If we add Pat, that will be the first time that we’ve had everybody on our roster that’s available to play at the same time, but of course I don’t know how much he’ll give us just because he hasn’t practiced much. I like our confidence. I like where our guys’ headspace is right now.”
“[Devon Daniels] has matured. He’s playing really good basketball. If I had to pick one guy that I would say has played the best basketball for us as of late, it would be Devon Daniels. We talk about how he’s doing offensively, but I don’t think we give him enough credit. He’s become one of the better on-the-ball defenders that we have on our team and probably in the ACC. I’ve talked about getting to the rim more instead of settling for floaters. At one point, Devon was the floater king. He would float everything. Now because I’ve said, he’ll try to make two or three floaters. He’s been able to get all the way to the rack. I’m happy with him. He’s starting to understand what a good shot is for me, not for him. We talk about that all the time.”
“I try to have as much conversation with these guys about what we need from each guy to be able to help our team. He’s taken it to heart. There’s not one day that he has ever come to practice and not competed, and he’s getting rewarded for how hard he works everyday.”
“Absolutely. We're going to watch tape today. I can tell you now that we’re going to start off with how many offensive rebounds they got and how they were dominant in the paint. I thought those guys completely dominated us in the paint. When you look at Brooks, he was really good. Bacot didn’t have a great offensive night, but he did a tremendous job. There was one possession that I just watched again, and I don’t know why I do this to myself. I got extremely mad because we had a turnover at half-court where they ripped C.J. Bryce, and they went down and missed a shot, but they got five consecutive offensive rebounds before Brooks ended up making a basket. That’s just not who we are. We’ve got to do a better job in that area. To answer the question, playing a team the second time around typically goes a little differently. I need it to go differently for us as far as controlling those guys on the offensive glass."