AUDIO: Wade, Copeland & Lubin’s Postgame Press Conference After #23 NC State’s Loss to Texas (with transcript)

Head Coach Will Wade, Guard Quadir Copeland and Forward Ven-Allen Lubin met with the media for their postgame press conference after their 102-97 loss to Texas in their final game of the 2025 Maui Invitational tonight. You can listen to the audio above, and read the transcript below.

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Coach, what did you think about your team’s performance tonight?

Wade: Well, I just thought in the first half, it got away from us. We shot too many turnovers. They’re one of the best teams in the country, converting off missed shots, and we shot a bunch of mid-range jump shots. Shot turnovers, got ourselves down 10, fought back. We missed four straight free throws, including the technical, and then two before that.

Could have given us a little bit of a cushion, but just not good enough on any facet.

I didn’t have us prepared like we needed to, and just very disappointing game today, and quite frankly, just an incredibly disappointing week for us. This is not our standard. This is not what we strive to be, and this was an extremely, extremely disappointing week.

Q, you finished with 28 points today. You’re high in an NC State uniform, but clearly it’s an emotional one for you. Just your thoughts on this game and your performance as a whole, too.

Copeland: We’ve got to be better. We’ve got to be more disciplined, and we’ve got to lock in more. I feel like our preparation wasn’t the best. I don’t feel like we were focused, and I don’t feel like us together, as a whole, were mentally prepared or ready for this. I think we didn’t take this serious, so one of the worst feelings, really.

Ven-Allen (Lubin), second game where you’ve had 16-plus in this tournament, but again, the struggles on the defensive end of the floor. Just your thoughts on this one and what you take away from Maui.

Lubin: To help my team out, it’s not really about scoring. It’s just doing whatever I can to impact on both ends of the floor. So I think we’ve just got to do better defensively, whether that’s communicating, flying around, being more aggressive, putting pressure on the ball, and giving the team one shot at the rim, so we can go out and play our game on the other end. But that’s something that we can learn from this, while we head back and continue to develop, and take some days to rest, and then come back and get better.

How much did the, obviously the defensive issues were one thing, but how much did the fouls contribute to that for both of you? The fact that you weren’t able to have some of the more familiar faces out there, you had Darrion Williams with two in the first half, Tre Holliman, and then Alyn Breed fouling out there late too.

Copeland: I feel like that affected us, but we weren’t prepared. We weren’t mentally right from the start to the finish. We started off down 10, and then we tried to fight back with the last 20 minutes left. We should have had that grip from the beginning of this whole tournament, I feel like so.

Of course, guys know when stuff like that happens, we’ve got to step up. We’ve got to stay together in these moments and, you know, when we get back, this is going to be a real, it should be, a real rude awakening for us. I feel like guys, me included, should want to get better from this. Should want to get way better from this.

This is a disappointing feeling. We let a lot of people down. We had so many fans here, apologize to the guys that came here and supported us. We had so many people here, and we let them down. We let ourselves down. We let the staff down, and we’re going to be better from this, but this should be a rude awakening for the guys, and me included. This should definitely be a rude awakening for us to want to be better, and pick up the urgency with everything.

Coach, I know it’s a disappointing loss. When you look at it, there are a lot of things that you were, you know, we think about the points in the paint, and things like that, but it seemed like defending on the three-point line, they shot well from there. What was happening defensively where folks were breaking down around in terms of the perimeter?

Wade: We’re going to have to look at some of our defensive stuff. I mean, we’re just not where we need to be defensively. So I’ve got to look at all that when we get back, and start watching on the plane tonight as we’re flying back.

But, you know, (Jordan) Pope hit some tough ones off the bounce, which, you know, he’s a career 36% three-point shooter, that’s going to happen. But, you know, we left five (Camden Heide) open a couple of times.

We just had too many mistakes. Some of it in the second half, I mean, we only had five or six guys we really trusted to play, so we had some guys out there that were very worn down. So that was certainly disappointing, but just all systems broke down defensively.

You kind of talked about it there. I see the same questions as the players, but just your thoughts on how the fouls kind of contributed to that too, where you’re having a lot of different personnel on that one.

Wade: I mean, that had nothing to do with it. We’ve got good players. We’ve got depth. We expect those other guys to be able to go in, you know, and perform. And we don’t have guys right now that can turn the page quick enough when things go well, or when things go poorly. We don’t turn the page.

And so, I mean, look, we’ve got, it’s good and bad. We’ve got really, really nice kids, players, men, young men. We’ve got great people, but we don’t have the edge that we need. We don’t play with the edge that we need. I’ve been trying to instill an edge and, but just haven’t been able to get through to them. This is on me. It ain’t them. They’re good kids. They’re trying, but we don’t have the hard edge that you need in these type games. We just don’t have it, and we’ve got to develop it, and we’ve got to develop it quick, because it’s not going to get any easier Wednesday night. In fact, it’ll be one of the probably three or four toughest games on our schedule Wednesday night.

And if we don’t figure out some things defensively, and we don’t figure out some things, could be on the record books on the bad side for the Pack. So we’ve got a lot of work to do these next few days.

You know, I still believe in our guys. I like the character of our group, but we just don’t have the edge that we need. Our teams usually play with an edge, and we don’t. So maybe now that we’ve been knocked down, everything’s been pretty rosy for the last seven, eight months. Maybe now we’ll be able to get to work, but I mean, we’ve got tough ground to plow now. We’ve put ourselves in a really, really difficult spot, and we’ve got really tough ground to plow. So we move forward, it’s going to be hard dirt. We’ve got a lot of work to do, to see how we’re going to respond.

I was going to ask you as a follow up, I mean, how good is it to have somebody like Quadir on your roster that clearly is already taking that accountability, and somebody that wants to help kind of move that throughout the locker room too?

We’ll see. I mean, it all sounds good sitting up here. You know, we’ll see.

But you know, we’ll get it right. We always figure it out, and we’ll figure it out with this group. The problem is, is, you know, we’re in a little bit different situation where we have to make some hay in the non-conference, and we’ve really given away some great opportunities here. It’s really put our backs against the wall, and put us in a corner. We’ll come out swinging, but I thought we played much better today than we played Monday, in terms of effort. But when you play against really good teams, and they’re giving their best effort, and you’re giving your best effort, you can lose. We don’t understand that right now.

We could go to Auburn on Wednesday and play an A-plus game, and not get the result we want. All we can focus on is playing the best that we can play. We’ve got a lot of stuff and we’re going to look at everything.

We’re going to look at the rotation, look at who we’re playing. I thought the one positive from this tournament was that Alyn’s (Breed) catching on. Alyn can help us. I thought that was a positive. I thought Ven did a nice job in the tournament as well. But, outside of that, you know, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

I apologize to our fans. We had the most fans here. People sacrificed. People pay hard-earned money to watch us play, and they should be pissed. So that’s why we’ve got passionate fans. That’s why we’ve got great fans is, you know, they’re upset. And, you know, they should be. This isn’t how we should be playing. This isn’t the standard to which we play at.

I just feel like that we’ve got to somehow capture an edge. I’m sure dropping out of the rankings will be good for us. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Even against VCU, we didn’t play well. We took over 50% of our shots off the bounce. W took a bunch of off the bounce shots in the first half against Texas, and they ran out with it. VCU couldn’t quite do what they did with it, but Texas could.

So just disappointing and disappointed for our program. Disappointed for our fans. Disappointed for our players. But it’s not on the players. It’s on me. It’s my job to lead the program. It’s my job to get everybody right, and get us better, get us moving in the right direction, and we haven’t done that as well as we need to.

We’ll move forward from here, and we will certainly improve and get better, and hopefully play with more of an edge.