NC State focused on ‘fresh start’ at ACC tournament 

WASHINGTON — NC State arrives at Capital One Arena for the ACC tournament having lost seven of its last nine contests going into the postseason. The slump down the stretch — after the Pack had a 5-1 start to league play — put the red and white without any bye in the postseason. 

The Wolfpack, which made the NCAA tournament a year ago, will play 15th-seeded Louisville to open the conference tournament on Tuesday afternoon. Though NC State coach Kevin Keatts did not want to make excuses for his team’s play to close the regular season, he noted the Pack had one of the hardest slates in the ACC.

“We’ve had the third-toughest schedule in the ACC,” Keatts said after NC State’s practice Tuesday. “When we looked at it, we knew all the teams were going to be tough, but we knew our backend was really tough. We may be the only team that’s had to play two ranked teams on a Saturday and Monday. … We knew that we had a really tough backend of the schedule.”

NC State had a chance in most of those games. It lost by 3 against Pitt, by 4 at Wake Forest, by 4 against Syracuse and by 7 at Florida State before the margins of defeat grew to 9 at North Carolina, 15 against Duke and 9 at Pitt to end the year. 

Keatts thought his team was in all of those contests, but it fell short because of a five- to six-minute stretch in each one that the Wolfpack did not play well. And those teams, three of which finished inside the ACC’s top four, made NC State pay for that mistake. 

But the seventh-year coach looked at the backend of NC State’s ACC schedule as a double-edged sword. They lost to quality teams, but keeping up with those squads helped show the Pack it could play with anyone. 

“Because the teams are really good, they took advantage of when we didn’t play well,” Keatts said. “I think our guys are still locked in. The good thing about when you play such a tough schedule and you play some of the teams that got the double bye … and you’re right there, then our guys know and believe there’s still a chance.”

The Pack, which set a goal to return to the NCAA tournament this season, still has a path to it. It just has to win five games in five days, but NC State’s players are taking a one-day-at-a-time approach. 

Graduate guard Casey Morsell tried to look at the early start to the tournament as a positive.

“1-0, that’s the goal,” Morsell said. “It’s a new season. It’s a fresh start. Being able to have the opportunity to play early, have an opportunity to get this momentum going heading into [the rest of] the tournament. That’s all we can do.”

Winning one day at a time may be an important mindset for the Wolfpack, but it will be a tall task to run through the tournament field. Should NC State beat Louisville, it would face seventh-seeded Syracuse on Wednesday — a team that swept the Pack in the regular season. 

For Keatts, it is about cleaning up the issues that have hurt them the most, which includes staying locked into the defensive scouting report for all 40 minutes. 

“I want to clean up our mental mistakes,” Keatts said. “I think at times, we have some lapses and a couple things that we can do better. We’ve lost a few turnover battles, which I haven’t liked. Rebounding has been an issue lately, so we have to do a better job in that.”

And while the defensive end is important, he noted that the issues on that part of the game have bled over into the offensive aspect for the Pack, too. Keatts wants his squad to avoid that at all costs in Washington, D.C.

“I just want to see us stay connected. Late in the season, when we stop scoring a little bit, it kind of hurt our defense a little bit. Guys didn’t defend well because we were struggling. We became so focused on what we didn’t do offensively it hurt us.”

Though those errors have hurt the Wolfpack over the final stretch of the season, including a four-game losing streak going into the postseason, Keatts said he does not feel any pressure at the ACC tournament.

“I don’t,” Keatts said. “Whether we won the four in a row or we lost them, every team is 0-0 right now. … The greatest thing about March when you go into your tournament, everybody has the same equal opportunity. Do I like the fact we dropped four? Absolutely not. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to move on. We’ve got a game to play.”

“From this point on, any time you win, you advance and any time you lose, you go home,” Keatts continued. “That’s what our focus is right now.”