Freeman: "All Of Our Practices Are Really Hard"

NC State senior guard Allerik Freeman met with the media to discuss the start of the season.

How different has it been with the gap between games as opposed to earlier in the season?
It has been really good. Practices are really just focusing on us, defensive, and just trying to figure out the little kinks here and there, and just going hard, competing with each other. At the end of the day, we just want to do what we can and control what we can control to be the best version of ourselves. 

Has the team talked about getting off to a fast start? 
For sure. When you play against really good teams, especially in the ACC , you can’t afford to get off to a slow start. We were fortunate enough to dig ourselves out of a hole against Penn State starting down, I think, 11-0, something like that.

Those type of games really come back to bit in the butt so we really just want to try our best to get out to a fast start and play a full 40 minute game, not having any mental lapses. 

Is it better to have the next few games spread out?
Yeah, it is pretty cool. I actually think pretty weird for a few of us just because we are so used to playing back-to-back like that. We are used to playing with a little bit of fatigue but at the same time that is what we practice for.

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Al Freeman

All of our practices are really hard, really competitive, really intense and, I think, prepared us for those first seven games that played and now we get a little bit of a rest but we have still got to come out there focused . We have still got to come out there with high energy, getting out to a fast start…we just want to try to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. 

How much has NC State grown since the two losses in the Bahamas?
Every game we try to learn from. Those two losses that we had, it was tough but there is always something you can go back on the film and talk about as a team, focus on practice the very next day. Some things that we really focus on is just defense and running in transition, controlling the pace and the last two games that we played we tried to get better at those things.

We try to get better at our turnovers, shooting percentage, defensive field goal percentage so every game you just want to take something away from it. 

Going to the Bahamas was really good for us It gave us a chance to see where we really were matching up against high-major teams. We are just excited for the upcoming season. 

Is the NC State defense getting the deflection totals that the team had hoped for?
There is definitely improvement on every single aspect of the game. Deflections is something that we pride ourselves on the defensive end. When we go out there on the defensive end we just want to create chaos. We want to get deflections on every pass.

We want to try to grab every rebound. We want to try to run as fast as we can and get the game going as up-tempo as possible. To do that you can’t let easy passes go through. You have got to get as many deflections as you can.