How does NC State men’s basketball move on after humbling loss to Duke with postseason looming?

By Noah Fleischman

They walked into the postgame press conference with a reserved and quiet tone. It was a much different view from what the same small room in the bowels of the Lenovo Center looked like last time NC State players sat in the same chairs after knocking off rival North Carolina with ease 13 days ago. 

Instead of holding a bedazzled belt to celebrate the critical win, Wolfpack seniors Darrion Williams and Quadir Copeland didn’t hide their disappointment. They were just moments removed from a 93-64 loss to No. 1 Duke, making this Monday night press conference focused on one thing: Finding a way to move on. 

The loss stung, but neither veteran wanted to sulk in the defeat. They were somber, yet determined to turn the page after dropping their fifth game in the last six, which marked the third of 29 points or more. 

Copeland, who helped McNeese win an NCAA Tournament game over Clemson last season, was asked about where the team goes from here. What did the game plan look like to make a push in college basketball’s most-critical month with the postseason just over a week away?

“Win,” Copeland deadpanned. “That’s the best game plan there is. What else can we really do? Not lose games.”

NC State’s last half dozen outings have played out like a nightmare scenario, outside of the win over the Tar Heels. That was the high note of the stretch. The other five games, well, they were straight out of a horror movie. 

A 41-point loss at Louisville. The blown seven-point lead in the final minute to Miami inside the Lenovo Center. A 29-point romp at Virginia, which was never truly competitive. The blown nine-point advantage with less than five minutes to play at a struggling Notre Dame to lose in overtime. And then being run off the floor against the top-ranked Blue Devils.

This isn’t where NC State imagined it would be at the beginning of the season. Will Wade’s self-dubbed “Red Reckoning” hasn’t played out how he’d hoped, but he admitted Duke and Virginia are in a weight class of their own, making those two losses tall tasks from the beginning. 

What has eaten at him a lot, however, is the defeats that he felt the team gave away. Miami and Notre Dame are a part of it, and so is the four-point loss to Georgia Tech in mid-January. The veteran coach hadn’t ever had a season in which he felt like his teams lost a quartet of games — likely factoring in the Texas loss in Maui —  it should have won, but he has now. 

“We’ve got to punch in our weight class better than we have. That’s been the most disappointing thing for me,” a reflective Wade said. “We’ve lost, in my opinion, four different games that we were supposed to win. And that turns a good season into an OK season. … We’ve always been able to hit the three- to five-foot puts.”

Of those four losses, a pair of them have come at home. For a team that went 6-3 on the road in ACC play, squandering several opportunities in front of its own crowd frustrates Wade even more.

“We haven’t handled our business well enough, we have to some extent, but we haven’t, especially at home,” Wade said. “We haven’t been able to get off the ground like we’ve wanted to because of those games. … That’s been the biggest struggle.”

NC State can’t change any of that now. It has one regular season game remaining — a date with Stanford on Saturday afternoon — before turning its attention to the ACC Tournament next week. The Wolfpack hasn’t inched towards the bubble yet, but finding any way to stop the bleeding is imperative in building momentum for the NCAA Tournament later this month. 

Wade admitted the extra preparation time with a Monday game will help, including installing the 2-3 zone that the Wolfpack deployed after working on it for just three practices, but his entire team’s focus is on the Cardinal. It would give the Pack its 20th win of the season and, more importantly, some confidence entering the most important part of the schedule.

After all, the program wants to be in the weight class that Duke and Virginia operate in, but it has a long way to go in a short period of time to do just that. But, in the meantime, it appears NC State will treat the Stanford game as if it were a part of the ACC Tournament with the attention to detail needed to snap out of its skid.

“We’ve got to put everything we’ve got into Stanford on Saturday,” said Wade, who noted a loss would make the Wolfpack’s Selection Sunday viewing “trickier.” “It’s the biggest game of the season. We’ve got to recalibrate and get ready to go.”

Winning changes a lot for a team. NC State was jubilant after it beat UNC two weeks ago, which was after back-to-back losses to Louisville and Miami. Now, after three consecutive defeats, the Wolfpack is licking its wounds. 

The easiest solution? Finding a way to outscore its opponent, which happens to be Stanford.

“That’s the main focus: Win games. We win games, no one’s got nothing to say, at the end of the day. When we won six [straight] games, everyone was happy. We’ve been losing, and now everybody is sad. That’s how it goes,” Copeland said. “We just got to win games, that’s all. We’re going to stick together, stay with each other, and we’re going to win games. Simple as that.”