Kevin Keatts On The Weekend Off: "Our Guys Were Tired"

NC State head coach Kevin Keatts discussed Boston College, the health of his team, and much more on the ACC's weekly teleconference.

NOTE: Click the video above to watch the interview.

Your first ACC Tournament was in Brooklyn. You were also in the Garden with Louisville as an an assistant. How do you feel about the difference in the two buildings for tournaments?
It’s so different.

When I was at Louisville and we played at the Garden, don’t hold me to this, but I think we were struggling a little bit and went in as an eight or nine seed and found a way to win it. That’s when basketball, you could just clobber each other. It was very physical and the game has changed now, but we won the Big East championship there and it was pretty doggone good for me and I liked it.

It’s completely different. It’s a great place to play. Both venues, one is more legendary and one will be legendary one day. That's probably the best answer I can give you.

You got the win at Georgia Tech and you had a break after it. Would you like to keep things going to keep momentum or did you need a reset?
You're going to have to ask me that question Wednesday at the press conference because it just depends on how we play. Obviously if you're playing well, you want to continue to play, but you need some rest.

I would hope that us having off, and we've been fortunate, we’re one of the few teams that didn’t have to pause for COVID, and that's why we were able to get the weekend off.

I will know more on Wednesday when we start playing the game whether we wanted to keep playing or if the rest really helped us, because I don't know any coach will know that until you play.

Sometimes it's so important...  I do know that we don't have that much depth and our guys were tired. The week before, we played a lot of games, and hopefully the few days we got off to rest was good.

When you're playing well, and that was probably one of our most complete games on both ends of the floor, I would have rather played the next day, but I don't know how Wednesday will be. Hopefully it will be great for us in our favor.

How much time did you guys have off?
We played on Tuesday, and we came back and we took Wednesday and Thursday off, got back in the gym on Friday and Saturday... took Sunday off and then we’ll practice today and tomorrow to get ready for Wednesday.

It's the first time that we could have a couple days off in a row, and I think we really needed it.

Cam Hayes has played well for you the last couple of games coming off the bench. Did you see something from him where you saw those performances coming?
He's had better practices. He's starting to put together several good practices back to back where he impacted practice because he was playing good basketball, and it has carried over into the game.

It’s really, he's had a tough year, but to his credit he hasn't put his head down and laid down with it. He's continued to work, and that's all you can ask for as a coach.  When I say tough year, he hasn't shot the ball the way we expected him to shoot the ball for the year, but he's still competing, he's still playing hard.

Everybody that's frustrated with Cam; Cam is frustrated with himself because he knows he's a much better player than he's shown. We're sticking with him and continuing to help him grow in practice and through individual workouts and everything else.

It's good to see him playing the last couple games to have some success, because he deserves it.

Coach Grant is in his first year at Boston College. Are you familiar with him, and what have you seen from those guys?
Well familiar with him because we were in the same league, but that's been five years ago, so a lot of things have changed in five years.

Earl has [been] doing a really good job with his team. What I mean by that is they compete and play hard. That's what you want when you come in and take over a program.

I remember my first year, my first message to those guys was, “Hey, obviously you're going to get a new system, you're going to have a new coach... new strategies and new defense, but if you will  compete and play hard, I'll be happy.” We were fortunate enough to have a really good year that year.

His guys are competing, and they play hard. They're actually a really good basketball team. Usually in your first year it's tough to get road wins, and they've got one at Clemson and done a good job.  They had a chance to almost beat a good Notre Dame team twice.

The ball movement seemed much better at Georgia Tech. What were your thoughts on that performance?
I thought we've had two really good games where we shared the ball, and both of them happened to be against teams who played zone. I thought in the Syracuse game we made 16 threes because we moved the ball, and we did a lot of things. We didn't have the outcome that we would have liked. We ended up losing that game.

Then on the road at Georgia Tech, we were able to move the ball. The reason why we didn't have as many assists is because we moved the ball around and we had some driving lanes and we took advantage of it, and we got out in transition. That was one of our better games on both ends. What I mean by that is offensively I thought we came out of the gate playing extremely well and then we did a good job defending.

We knew going into the Georgia Tech game, in order to win the game we needed it to be in the 70s and they would have loved for it to be in the 60s.

I was proud of our guys. We had some guys that played well. Terquavion Smith completely carried us in the first half with those 18 points. It was good. It was refreshing to see our team play, and we've had three games this year where you look at this team and say, “Man, even though they're undermanned and they don't have a back-to-the-basket post, they've played some really good basketball." At Louisville, the same thing can be said at Virginia Tech, and when we played Virginia here.

When you recruited Dereon Seabron did you see this for him, and what has his development meant?
We did. We saw a guy who's long, athletic.  He's 6’6” and has perimeter skills and you can kind of play him in multiple positions. We saw a slashing guy that could play in the passing lane and get out in transition.

His development has completely helped this team, and we've actually needed him to play the way he's played. This would be a completely different team if we had our returner in Manny Bates, but in some respects, our points in the paint, because our young bigs can't score, have come from Dereon Seabron. He does it in a little different way, so that's helped us a little bit.

That doesn't help us when we need to get a basket where we can throw the ball inside, but he's done it in a different way, where he can drive the ball. So he's playing the point for us, but he's probably been our best post guy because he's our leading rebounder and best paint-touch guy.