WOLFERETTI: Were last year’s portal decisions the reason for this year’s collapse?

With Saturday’s loss to Clemson, NC State has now lost 6 straight games. They’ve lost 7 of 8 and they are now in 17th place in the ACC (there are 18 teams now).

NC State is now on the outside of the ACC Tournament looking in. Yes, you read that right. NC State’s NCAA hopes died a couple of weeks ago,. Now they are fighting just to be able to defend their ACC Tournament Championship.

As unbelievable as last year’s run was, this encore of a season is just as unbelievable to me. The idea that NC State would parlay a Final Four and ACC Tournament Championship into a season where you might not even make the conference tournament is insane. We’ve all laid out the hypothetical roadmap for NC State Basketball to return to glory…

First, you luck out with a few recruits/transfers who have simply had enough and have the confidence and the ‘want-to’ to break the spell that NC State’s been under for the past 40 years. You beat UNC, You beat Duke, you hang a banner. You establish dominance nationally in the NCAA Tournament. And then it begins. The hype from the run gets you better recruits, and those recruits continue your success more and more until you’re a top 4 team in the ACC annually.

We’ve waited for the stars to align like this for 30+ years, and last year they started to align. It was as if the basketball gods had seen enough and just went ahead and broke the NC State spell. The hard part was done. Now you just had to take that blueprint and ride that success into the next season. If you could do that, the foundation would start to settle and you could build.

That didn’t happen.

Much of the problem started with decisions made in the portal last season…

NC State took two guys off of a Louisville team that was 3-17 in ACC play. Mike James hasn’t played a minute due to injury and Brandon Huntley-Hatfield has been a miss. He looks frustrated at times and disinterested at other times. And maybe that’s just his personality, but are these things that the staff just missed? Hatfield is averaging just 21 minutes per game, with Ben Middlebrooks winning out as NC State’s starting center. Either way, picking up 2 major contributors from a team with a historic losing culture was questioned by fans and media right off the bat, but they gave Keatts and staff the benefit of the doubt. Those questions seem to be still relevant.

They took Dontrez Styles, who was coming from a Georgetown team that went 2-18 in the Big East during the 2023-24 season. Styles has actually been one of the lone bright spots for NC State, but his 10 points and 4 boards per game is certainly lower than Keatts was expecting. However, over the past two games, he’s increased his volume and has 42 points on 16-26 shooting (10-14 from 3-point range). All of that said, Styles is only averaging 24 minutes per game and his role has been perplexing. To me it’s clear that he’s a 3 trying to be pushed into the 4 spot. Styles has been a small ball 4 his entire college career and those teams have never found success despite him having obvious value on both sides of the basketball.

They also took Marcus Hill, who averaged 20.5 points for a 10-8 Bowling Green team that finished 5th in the Mid-American Conference. Now, Hill has been good in spurts for NC State, but looks more like a guy who isn’t sure of his role and/or is being asked to play a position he’s not comfortable with and less like a leader guard. Hill also came in shooting 29% from 3-point range and unsurprisingly is shooting 23% from long range this season.

So what was the thought with this roster?

Was the idea that Mike James would be your go-to scorer? After averaging 11 ppg on two of the worst teams in ACC history. After never really being a volume scorer? Was this the guy you wanted to bet the farm on? That’s hard for me to believe, but if you want, you can point the entire season’s collapse on Mike James being lost to injury. I just don’t think that’s the real story.

Was the thought that Brandon Huntley-Hatfield would step in and become an interior force, having the offense run through him like DJ Burns?

I do think this was the idea. And I think it’s why you’ve seen Hatfield seem so frustrated this season. He’s not being used like Burns and it’s mainly because he doesn’t have the skill set Burns had. He’s a decent back-to-the-basket big, with decent vision and a decent shot, but you realized quickly that trying to play through Hatfield wasn’t going to be a winning formula.   In my opinion, this was a misread by the staff. I think they believed he could come in, give about 70% of what Burns gave you offensively, and give you a much better defender and rim protector. Turns out, he struggles guarding the pick and role, and is constantly lost playing team defense, so the equation doesn’t necessarily work out. Hence the 21 minutes per game and the emergence of Ben Middlebrooks.

And why did you bring in Marcus Hill? Hopefully not to be a floor spacer on the wing? Right? The guy shot 29% from 3 last year. He’s got a resume of work between juco and college, showing that he does his best work with the ball in his hands. However, NC State almost refuses to use him in the pick and roll. And look, I get that he’s probably the most comfortable in space, being isolated. But on this team, with this roster, he needs to be a playmaker. He needs to be able to force opposing defenses into situations where they need to make choices. The most chaos you can create, with a skill set like Hill’s, is off of the pick-and-roll.

Was the idea that Jayden Taylor was going to take that next step and become the next DJ Horne or Terquavion Smith? The next CJ Bryce or Al Freeman? It seemed like it, especially they way he was being used early on, but the data made it real clear that this wasn’t just not backed up by the numbers, but it was disproven by the numbers. Last season, you saw him settle into a 6th man role with lower usage, more spot shooting, and more focus on defense. That is when you saw him begin to excel.

So in my opinion, this offseason was rife with miscalculation, and it happened to take place when the brightest lights were on the program. It’s unfortunate, but it’s hard to argue that this isn’t a major part of NC State’s struggles.

And this isn’t just about the roster… 

We’ve talked ad nauseam about the lineups and the minute distribution being an issue. We’ve talked about small ball vs. playing big. Playing fast vs. playing slow.

All of those things are issues that come from the fact that this roster isn’t complete. It’s filled with redundancy. Guards who can’t score. Undersized forwards. No shooters. No creators. No proven leaders.

I know people are saying “Players have to make shots.” But not all players are shot makers. Everyone on NC State is playing near their career average. This is what the numbers told you you’d get and it’s what you got. If you want players to make shots, go get guys who have made shots before.

To win with this roster, you need creative coaching. You need to find new ways to win. You can’t just roll out this roster and think it’s going to win in the ACC, and even if you did roll it out , you should have drastically changed direction after it became clear 2 weeks ago that this ship is sinking.

Then you have the freshmen. 

Maybe you felt like Paul McNeil and Trey Parker were going to step up as your stars eventually. Honestly, I don’t like the odds of a freshman ever doing that, but skill-set-wise, it’s the only thing that would make sense to me.

McNeil is a shot maker. Parker is a bonafide playmaker and 3-level scorer. There are no one else on the roster with these skill sets. However, if that was the strategy, then why weren’t these guys getting serious minutes early in the season to work out kinks? Why are they only finally getting really thrown into the fire now that the season is lost?

There are so many questions here. In all my years of covering basketball, I’ve never been so confused on what the goals and strategies are of a given team.

The best I can make of it is that NC State had very poor evaluations in the portal and a majority of what we are seeing play out this year is the staff trying to find some way to make up for that.

Anyone else got any ideas?