Will Wade’s Postgame Presser After NC State’s Win Over UAB: TRANSCRIPT

Head Coach Will Wade met with the media for his postgame press conference after NC State’s 94-70 win over UAB tonight. You can watch the video above, and read the transcript below.

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Coach, kind of talking about the first half, it’s kind of a slow start, especially from the outside. What was the difference today?

Yeah, we didn’t take very good threes. Their zones messed us up, playing the 3-2, switching it up to man. We didn’t get our inside-out threes. We were just passing around the perimeter. We were taking threes off of bad passes when we were falling out of bounds on one of the threes.

Our shot quality wasn’t what it needed to be, so that was pretty disappointing, but we were able to get that corrected as we went through the game.

How do you prepare for a team that mixes up their defense so much?

Well, we changed our defenses in practice. It’s hard to get in rhythm. That’s why they do it. We do a lot of the same things.

He’s a great coach. He’s done that for a long time, the way he changes his defense. He’d stick with the 3-2 zone for a while. They played the 3-2, and 2-3 when Q (Quadir Copeland) came in, because Q’s shooting numbers haven’t been great. It’s 3-4 these first two games, which is great. He’s worked on it hard. I’m proud of him about that.

But they mix up the zones, so it’s hard to get in rhythm against it. It bothered us. We turned the ball over 14 times. It’s way too many. Our two point guards had seven of the 14 turnovers between Tre (Holloman) and Q. That’s unacceptable. They understand that. I address that in the locker room. We’ve got to be cleaner with the ball.

We had two turnovers on outlet passes. We had a turnover on a dribble to control. We had a lot of self-inflicted wounds, which we’ve got to get better at. That’s not going to work. We’ve got to improve there and be better.

What does this say about your team’s shooters to come back in the second half and hit 10 of their last 18 threes?

We’re going to keep firing. We’ve got good shooters. We’ve got really good players. We needed to improve our shot quality. I thought we did that. It was big in the first half. Paul (McNeil Jr.) got the lid off of it for us.

But it’s just little things. We were supposed to have a clean look on the second play of the game for Paul on a gut screen. We didn’t screen.

The game can go a lot different…That’s in the margins right there. The game can go a lot differently if we set the screen at the proper angle and we hit the guy. Paul gets a clean look and maybe that goes in and we can make 20 threes. They don’t play the zone and they’ve got to play a certain defense the whole time. We contributed to them being able to play at their pace for a while, which was difficult.

It felt like y’all gave up some easy baskets in the lane again. I know the back end defense has been something that you’ve harped on. Is there anything that sticks out in terms of what it will take to fix?

Yeah, we’ve got to guard the damn ball. Our defenders have to guard the ball one-on-one. We gave up 44 points in the paint tonight. Luckily, they shot 4 of 25 from 3. But we just got blown by, blown by, blown by. We started subbing guys out as they got blown by. We’ve got to be able to sit down and guard the ball.

Our gap help gets too extended. We’ve got to sit in the gaps and rake at the ball and not let them just straight line drive us to the paint. It was 44-44 in the paint. We did a good job, conversely, getting in the paint.

When they get in the paint, that’s how they get 17 offensive rebounds. Our guards have to be able to guard the ball, and then our guards have to be able to rebound. Giving up 17 offensive rebounds, if we didn’t crack down with the guards, that’s not going to work either.

We’ve got to be able to guard the ball. We’ve been working on that in practice, but we just got whipped middle, whipped middle, whipped middle. Other teams are going to see that and do that.

We can’t give up that level of dribble penetration if we want to be a great team. That’s something that we’re going to certainly have to improve on. Look, we gave up some stuff at the end of the press as well.

I thought Musa (Sagnia) was phenomenal tonight. He really saved us. Ven (Lubin) wasn’t as aggressive after he got those fouls, and that hurt us at the end of the press. I thought Musa was phenomenal.

We’ve got to be able to guard the ball one-on-one. At some point, you’ve got to be able to sit down and guard the guy in front of you and keep his ass out of the paint. If you can’t do that, we’ve got to go find somebody who can. We’ve got to be able to do that, and that is at the top of the priority list.

The turnovers, the rebounding, and being able to guard the ball one-on-one. Shot selection is a distant fourth, but those are at the top of the list.

I thought our free-throw shooting was good if we want to be positive. I thought we’ve been a good free-throw shooting team. 18 of 22, 82 percent. Really good.

You mentioned Musa. How much have you seen him grow over the last two months?

He’s been awesome. You can tell he never has a bad day. He’s always excited.

I was really proud of him. Look, it’s a massive amount of change. He was in Spain two and a half months ago. This is a different game. He picked up all those fouls. FIBA is a lot more physical than our game. It’s a big-time adjustment for him, and I think every game he’s going to continue to get better.

He was great tonight. He did a great job protecting the rim for us. He did a great job rebounding it. He kept a lot of balls alive. I’m really, really proud of him. He’s just going to keep improving and keep getting better. I’m really, really excited about his growth and where he’s going to be.

You held them to 4 of 25 shooting from three tonight. I heard you talk in the past about getting the right guys to take those shots. Was that more of a bad shooting night for them?

A little bit of both. Look, #15 missed some clean looks. He’s a really good three-point shooter. #4 is a good three-point shooter, but he shoots a ton off the bounce. I think he was a little rattled after the air balls.

Some of it was us. Some of it was they just missed some open shots. #12 did a good job getting them going at the beginning and getting them in rhythm.

It was a combination of they just missed some open shots. I thought our three-point defense was solid. We had the right guys taking them a couple times. Sometimes you’re going to make them.

It seems like the ball movement and the cohesion is really strong early for a new group. What would you attribute that to?  The guys said it just seems like they have a close bunch and they do a lot together. It makes it easier.

I think the number one thing I attribute it to is our best player is very unselfish. When Darrion Williams is your best player, and he’s on the side, I don’t know if you all saw tonight, Jerry (Deng) wasn’t playing real well. Darrion gets off the bench and goes and talks to Jerry, and gets Jerry going.

When you’re best player is that guy, it feeds to everybody else. I give all the credit to Darrion and those guys.

Q throws it to both teams. I’d rather him throw it to the team in the white jersey. He throws it to both teams, but Q, at his core, would much rather get an assist than score. When you’ve got a point guard out there looking to drive it to pass it to other guys, and Darrion’s looking to drive it to pass it to other guys, it makes other guys more shot ready. Everybody wants to play with him. It’s contagious. You look at the fast break between Darrion and Paul where they passed it back and forth twice and then Paul laid it in. That’s the sort of stuff you’re looking for. That’s the sort of stuff that’s important.

I’d be remiss, too. Colt (Langdon) scored his first college points tonight, so that was awesome. He works extremely hard. I was happy to see Colt score after redshirting last year at Butler. Colt’s a hard worker, man. He’s going to be a really, really good player. People forget he’s a redshirt freshman. He’s young. I was really, really happy that he could score his first points tonight.

Can you talk about your philosophy on turnovers? I know you want zero, but someone like Q that’s giving constant rim pressure versus someone that maybe isn’t. Are you more okay with it?

No, I’m not okay with any turnover. Look, I’m not saying we don’t want zero turnovers, but I’d like to keep it certainly under 12 and under 10.

Here’s what our point guards have to understand. When you have the ball, you have our program in your hands. You have NC State in your hands. All the fans watching on TV, everybody who cares about our basketball program, you have them in your hands. You have to take care of the ball.

Ball security is job security. If you want to be the point guard, then you have to secure the ball. You’re dribbling that ball for hundreds of thousands of people. There’s a lot of people that care about our program.

Look at our fans tonight. We’re incredible. The students were great having this place…Nine o’clock on a Friday night, are you kidding me? We had 15,000 in here, 16,000 in here. It was awesome.

You owe it to those people to take care of the ball. We have to do a much better job of that. A lot of it is when our offense gets stagnant. We just try to play one-on-one. Shoot. It’s hard to get by guys one-on-one.

Coach, kind of a light-hearted question, but it seemed like you were aware of the Chick-fil-A promotion with that missed free throw.

Two games in a row. Everybody gets free Chick-fil-A. Two games in a row.

How does that speak to the atmosphere?

It was awesome. It was loud the arena was all night. Everybody got free Chick-fil-A. Somebody told me, is this true? Somebody told me there was a bug in the system for the first game. Everybody who had the Chick-fil-A app in Raleigh got the thing.

Oh, that’s how it works every time? You don’t have to be here to decide it. You just open the app and you get it. No wonder we’re Raleigh’s team.

Chick-fil-A. How about that? It’s cool. I think it’s a great promotion. It gets everybody into the free throws. It’s a cool promotion.

Speaking of two games in a row.

Technical?

Yeah. What’s your streak that you’re going for on that one?

Hopefully this is it. I was not trying to get the technical tonight. I was not trying to get that. I was surprised. I’m going to have to adjust. This is a little softer than I’m used to. I’ll have to adjust to that.

Coach, you talked about the turnovers already for Quadir and Tre. You have that third conductor out there in Darrion. Does it give you more comfort?

Yeah, we should probably let him handle the ball more. He don’t turn it over as much.

Ven’s turnovers on the outlets killed us. We had a chance to run away there in the first half. We had it to five and seven. We had a chance to really run away. We threw two cross-court outlet turnovers. We worked on that in scouting for two days. The outlet passes, and the outlets have to go up the same side because they jump the opposite side outlets. They do that. We trust Vin as much as anybody in our program.

We just made some little mistakes. In big games, all those mistakes add up. We’ve got to be way cleaner on those details. We’ve got decent attention to detail, but if you want to be a championship-level team, you have to have obsessive attention to detail. You have to have obsessive attention to detail in everything that you do. Ours is fair to middling right now, and we’ve got to be better than that.

Thank you, guys. I do want to, once again, thank all the fans that came tonight. I thought it was awesome, and the students that came out. We’re very, very appreciative of everybody. I hope everybody comes back Wednesday night when we play the Spartans.