Kevin Keatts’ Postgame Press Conference After Kansas: TRANSCRIPT

NC State Head Coach Kevin Keatts met with the media for his postgame press conference after the Wolfpack lost to Kansas today on the road. The transcript is BELOW.

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Your initial thoughts.

Well, let’s start off with this. My first time ever playing in here.

What an unbelievable basketball atmosphere. I thought the crowd plays into it a lot. I thought our guys fought a lot.

I thought the beginning of the game when we got down, we struggled a little bit. I thought the last ten minutes of the first half, we really played well and actually outplayed them. I thought the beginning of the second half really hurt us.

When we came out, we were down eight at halftime. We came out and took two tough shots. We gave up two offensive rebounds.

Then the game kind of stayed right between 11 and 15, the entire game. The bright spots were both Ben (Middlebrooks) and Brandon (Huntley-Hatfield) were really good. I thought they did a good job.

Our team fought, but in situations where we’re playing on the road and we think it’s a really good team, we can’t have it where two or three of our good players don’t have great games. We’ve talked about it multiple times in the last few games.

Are you at all worried about the confidence of Michael (O’Connell) at all at this point?

I’m not worried about him.

Here’s the thing about him. He’s really tough on himself. He’ll figure it out. He’s never been a scorer until late March.

He’ll get better. He’ll understand. He’ll watch tape, and he’ll help us down the stretch.

I’m not overly concerned.

You mentioned both Ben and Brandon had a successful game. Is that kind of the one bigger positive that you would take away from this moving forward?

No, I thought, when you think about this now, Kansas has tremendous big guys.

I thought there was a stretch where Ben and Brandon were the best two players in the game, and so it gave us a glimpse of what we can do if we play those guys together. This game right here will prepare us for every road game that we play in the ACC, and obviously having the chance sometime to play those bigs together is going to be really good.

You’ve talked a lot about getting consistency this year. What is it going to take?

I think guys have got to continue to learn. I think we’ve got to continue to watch film, and we’ve got to continue to practice.

I’ll say it again. When we don’t have two or three of our good guys play well, it’s a long night for us. What I’m trying to do is get guys to do other things when they’re not scoring the basketball.

ACC play is always going to be critical, but how important is it now that you come away with four losses against four quality opponents?

I think it’s important anyway. When you look around our league, all of the talking heads, they have is getting four teams in the tournament. So regardless if we’ve been undefeated or not, we still have to figure out how to be effective in the ACC, position ourselves for the ACC tournament.

Are you concerned about the NET Rankings or anything?

I don’t know. I don’t understand it.

I don’t know how that thing works. I’m prefacing that now. I don’t understand.

Listen, I’ll tell you this now. As a guy that’s been left out ranked 32 in the NET, I’m not concerned about the NET. Last year, it didn’t matter what our NET was.

I think most coaches, including myself, have decided not to worry about the NET. You’ve just got to keep playing games and try to figure it out. Our NET probably will go up from losing on the road, playing against Kansas. So it’s really hard to figure out.

How much should Breon Pass earn maybe some more playing time or more responsibilities in this offense with the way that he played today?

I think Breon is a guy that can make shots on his team. So we can get him on and put him in a position where he can make shots.

He’s getting better. I’ve told everybody, this is a new bunch of guys playing together. There’s really technically one starter from last year, and that’s Michael O’Connell.

Both Ben and JT (Jayden Taylor), they played, but they didn’t play starter minutes all the time. Then you add the new pieces. So when you get to a position where you’re playing against an old team who’s good, who dropped their last couple games, you’re going to have games like this.

We’re going to need veteran guys like Breon Pass.

You had a decent turnout.

I’m proud of our fans for traveling. It was a tremendous atmosphere for our fans to see. We’ve got great fans.

I don’t complain about anything that deals with our fans. They’ve traveled. The ones who show up, I’m very grateful for them because I don’t know what everybody’s situation is.

So when they show up, they show up. We’re going to play hard and compete regardless who’s in the stands, but I’m excited to know what happens.

This is your first true road game of the season. You do it in Allen Fieldhouse. How much do you feel like that leaves your team battle-tested before you go back on the road?

We’re one of the few Power 4 teams that would actually do a home-and-home with Kansas, and we wanted that.

Whether it’s going to be a tournament situation or it’s going to be a road game, I want to play some of the best teams in the country. When we scheduled this, we knew that they were going to possibly be preseason #1 coming in. What a great atmosphere.

We’re not going to back away from that. We played this game and we played the games that we’ve played in and out of conference, so it could prepare us for conference play.

Do you want more home-and-aways in the future?

We’ll look at it.

It just depends. I like this one. What a great treat for our fans.

We had a lot of fans travel here, but you get the opportunity for Kansas to come back to NC State next year. That’s a great treat for our fans.