Kevin Keatts: "We're Blessed To Be One of 84 Teams Left Playing"
NC State men’s basketball will open the 2021 NIT Thursday in Texas as the third-seeded Wolfpack takes on two-seed Davidson at 7 p.m.
Kevin Keatts spoke to the media Wednesday about his team’s upcoming matchup, and here’s a full breakdown of everything he had to say:
How much is success in the NIT about the right mindset and wanting to be there?
Well, I think certainly that is a big picture for everyone. You have two segments of teams that obviously want to play in postseason play. One is, when you get to the NIT, a team that is just excited to be there. They didn’t know if they were going to make the tournament, but they’re happy to be there. Then you have teams that are really let down because they didn’t get in the tournament. From what I’ve seen from our guys the last couple of days, I see excitement. I see guys that want to play.
We’re blessed to be one of 84 teams left playing in our season. I think that’s important. When you look around, we have three segments of guys on our team. One of them is the seniors, those two guys obviously getting a chance to play. Then you have a middle segment with Jericole [Hellems] and Manny [Bates]. And then the bulk of our team are freshmen. For us, it’s really the experience of getting those guys to have the opportunity to play. When you look at us, I think we played 23 games this year. We would normally play 31. So when you look at that, we missed eight games. For us, it’s a little bit about everything; giving our seniors a chance to play, the middle guys some experience and opportunity to play, and really for our young guys being able to get the experience of playing in the postseason.
Do you have concrete goals set or things you really want the young guys to get out of this experience?
I want those guys to grow, and it’s weird, but just from a week ago playing in the ACC Tournament. That was their first ACC Tournament, and so people don’t understand that it’s difficult for a freshman. Seniors typically get you to advance in any tournament situation, or upperclassmen. I just want to see growth. I didn’t think any of those guys played great against Syracuse, not that I thought they were bad.
But they played as though they were young guys. I want to see the growth because as we move forward, as we advance, you want to see that so the next opportunity that they have next year to be able to play in some postseason, whether it becomes the ACC Tournament or NCAA, they’ve already had that under their belt. You can’t teach them what they’ve never been through. With these guys, it’s new to them. I just want them to grow from even what they did the one game in the ACC Tournament.
How can you use the NIT when it comes to recruiting?
I think it’s important that you understand that there’s a lot of teams not playing. I don’t know what the exact number is of Division I, I’m guessing with 353 teams and 84 teams are still playing. People get the chance to still watch us play on television on Thursday. To see the system that we play, to see how I interact with our guys more so than anything. I think anytime you’re playing, I’ve said this all along, we were fortunate to even have a chance to play this year. We didn’t know if we were going to play a full season. We didn’t know if we were going to play one or two games, and then we ended up getting a majority of the games in. And then obviously playing in the ACC Tournament, and us playing in the NIT. I think that helps with recruiting, knowing that your team has a chance to play in some postseason.
What were the discussions like with the team about accepting the NIT bid?
So, we had a day off when we got back. I just wanted those guys to get away from the tournament. I didn’t want to have a conversation with anyone until the next day after the tournament, the second day after we got back. I had a good talk with Jericole Hellems and D.J. Funderburk and Manny Bates and Braxton Beverly. Those were the guys who have had the biggest voice in the locker room this entire year, especially since [Devon Daniels] wasn’t around. I wanted to get a feel or temperature from those guys and what they thought about advancing.
We talked about ‘Hey, there’s a possibility if we were fortunate enough to get picked to play in the NCAA. We’ll be excited. But will there be the same excitement if it’s not the NCAA?’ All four of those guys actually said yes. I doubled back with them two days later just to make sure. And I did it individually because I didn’t want them to do it as a group. I didn’t want those guys to think, I didn’t want the pressure to come from me or them to hear how I felt about it. Each one of those guys said yes. I did a Zoom after that to put three of those guys, D.J. wasn’t available at the time, to get them back on to make sure we were still on the same page before we said yes.
Do you think there’s a difference between regular season experience and postseason experience and do you think this could help the program grow to where it really wants to be in the coming years?
In our case I do because we have so many young guys. If we were taking a bunch of seniors and playing in the NIT, I’m not sure that that would help us in the following year. Our roster has shifted from older guys with Thomas Allen and Devon Daniels to without having those guys now. I think it could certainly pay off. I think having the opportunity just to experience it and be able to play and try to advance in the postseason, I think it helps your program moving forward.
How exciting is to play an in-state opponent in Davidson in the postseason?
It’s a great team, tremendously coached. [Bob McKillop] has done a tremendous job with his team for as many years as anyone can remember. Obviously they went from one conference to a really unbelievable conference in the Atlantic 10. It says a lot about that conference because it tells you how many teams are playing in postseason whether it’s the NCAA or the NIT. But it’s exciting.
My wife Georgette joked, we don’t even have to go all the way to Dallas for the first-round game. Why don’t we just call them, play a neutral court game somewhere and then report that one and advance on, whatever happens. So I think it’s cool. They’re a good basketball team. Everyone I’ve spoken to has talked about that they think they’re one of the best if not the best team in the Atlantic 10 this year. They’ve had pauses that certainly didn’t work in their favor, just as everyone else has. It’s a really tough team, it’s a tough opponent. But I’m excited about having the chance to play it.
Did you have to get assurances from the NIT about how this was going to be facilitated?
We were having conversations back and forth, our administrators were, about what the NIT looked like this year. If you guys remember, at the end of the Syracuse game, one of the questions I asked was I want to know how it’s going to be. I wanted to make sure that it was going to be a first-class experience for our guys. I wanted to make sure that it was going to be ran correctly. Everything that we asked, they checked the box. We were excited about it, it’s going to be the same tournament that it’s been before, except it’s at a neutral court and it’s less teams.
When you look at the field, and you look at those 16 teams, at some point all 16 of those teams, including us, were on the board somewhere for the NCAA. So it’s a really good tournament. You could make the argument it’s a little bit stronger than it’s been in the past, because some of these smaller schools that won the regular season that didn’t win their tournament are not here. So it’sa lot of really good basketball teams.
After the Syracuse game, you said you didn’t want the season to be defined by that one performance. How important is it to get another opportunity to have a better taste in your mouth when it ends?
This has been the most challenging season as a player or a coach probably in the history of basketball, and that’s not just me saying that. You can talk to anybody around the country. So I’m not going to be disappointed in these kids in what the result of a game is. If we don’t play hard, as a coach, I’m one of those guys that’s disappointed about that if we don’t give great effort, which I haven’t seen.
What we went through this year was unbelievable, and the turnaround that we’ve had in our season is probably the best that I’ve been around. I don’t know that I’ve had a team that was down and out to be able to string together five games in a row, and the majority of them being on the road to get us where we are right now. We weren’t talked about as possibly being in the NIT when we were 8-9 and 4-8. So I’m just blessed.
A lot of coaches decided at the end of the year, it’s been such a long year, that they wanted to pack their uniforms, hug their kids, move on and just prepare for next year, we put ourselves in the situation where these guys weren’t there yet. They’re excited about playing. They liked what we’ve done at the end. Whatever happens here, our goal is obviously to come out and play as well as we can, try to win an NIT Championship, but whatever happens in this tournament will not damper the fight that these guys have given me the entire year in a year where it was easy for us to just say ‘man, we could lay down and not play’