NC State basketball seeks to find solutions for recent slow starts

In two of its last three games, NC State basketball found itself quickly falling behind by double-digits in a road loss at North Carolina and a home defeat to Notre Dame.

Thus, unsurprisingly NC State head coach Kevin Keatts is trying to find ways to alleviate that issue. One possible change under consideration: shortening the warm-up time on the court so that his roster, down to nine healthy scholarship players, is fresher when the game starts.

However, the ultimate issue, as Keatts sees it, is a lack of veteran experience.

“I just think it’s youth,” Keatts stated. “I may need to give my halftime speech at the beginning of the game, and maybe that’ll change things around.”

A good example of where the youth and inexperience shows up on the NC State basketball roster is at center, where sophomores Ebenezer Dowuona and Jaylon Gibson are the only options that Keatts has available to him.

Going into the season, Keatts noted, he expected one of the two, not knowing which, to perhaps play around 9-10 minutes a game spelling redshirt junior Manny Bates. Now the two are splitting the entire 40 minutes with Bates, plus junior forward Greg Gantt and freshman forward Ernest Ross, out for the remainder of the season.

Keatts has seen games, citing Duke for Dowuona and Syracuse for Gibson, where he thought the effort and work in practice was starting to translate into games.

However, the consistency has not been there, thus far.

“I’m proud of their growth,” Keatts added. “You cannot substitute the experience that they’re getting this year. We will be better for it, whether its the end of this season or next year, but I think both have taken really positive steps.”

“I just need consistency,” Keatts added. “At this point, we are who we are. I think both of those guys know that they have to play. … I want them to come in and play with extreme confidence. They’ve been playing all year long. Nobody is going to feel sorry for us. You are playing in the ACC and have ACC scholarship guys, so I want them to accept their role and be ready to play.”

Similarly, Keatts is looking for some of his leading performers, such as redshirt sophomore wing Dereon Seabron, to find ways to lead NC State to a win when the offense is not there.

“When you get into February some of the offensive plays that you have been running may not go,” Keatts noted. “You may not even shoot the ball as well because obviously a lot of teams will have tired legs. But at the end of the day, you got to rely on your defense to try to kind of get you out of some games.

“This is one of the games, that we just played against Notre Dame, that we were not really sharp offensively. Most times, we have been able to score, and then when we didn’t score, I thought we gave up too many easy transition baskets. We got off to a tremendously slow start … but some of our better guys, I want them to have more buy-in and do a better job on the defensive end because you are not going to always have a great night.”

Next up for NC State basketball is hosting upstart Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons are 19-5 on the season and 9-4 in the ACC. They are led by a pair of transfers. Senior wing Alondes Williams from Oklahoma is averaging 19.8 points and 7.0 rebounds per game, and junior forward Jake LaRavia from Indiana State is adding 15.1 points and 6.5 boards a contest.

“Talented,” Keatts said of Wake Forest. “I know this has been said, they’ve done a good job identifying some great transfers that really fit into their system to be able to play the way they want to play. They’re playing with a lot of confidence.

“Williams is as good as they come. He’s a really good player for them. There’s so many good pieces around him that they’re playing with great confidence. They’re playing their basketball, probably one of the hottest teams in our league right now.”

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