Head Coach Will Wade met with the media for his postgame press conference after NC State’s 108-72 win over Texas Southern this evening in Reynolds Coliseum.
Do you remember all of the clips of a fiery Will Wade in press conferences that were circulating leading up to his hiring? The clips of Wade unleashing his unfiltered frustrations regarding his teams?
We have heard Wade express concerns about this Wolfpack team, but we’ve yet to see the version of Wade we saw at his previous coaching stops.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, enjoy your first dose of an undeniably honest and ticked off Will Wade.
To be honest, I smiled the whole time. I’m sure he wouldn’t appreciate it, because he wasn’t even close to being in a smiling mood. But, I can’t help it. This version of Wade was what I was most excited about when he was hired. Not because I love sound bites, or salivate over negativity, but because when I saw those clips from the past, they made me an instant believer.
Box Score
Paul McNeil Jr. Broke the NC State Record for 3’s in a Game, & Tied the ACC Record
Paul McNeil Jr.’s 47 Points Rank 5th in NC State History
ACC Digital Network’s Highlight Reel & Condensed Game
Quick Hits
You can listen to the audio above, and read the transcript below.
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When you guys wear “State” jerseys, you’re shooting 45% from the three-point line. Are you superstitious?
I’m not superstitious, but competition also has something to do with it.
Well, how would you evaluate tonight’s offense, defense overall?
It’s fair. Obviously, Paul (McNeil Jr.) was phenomenal. Defensively, not very good. But Paul was great, especially getting us off to a good start. We get a working margin and then play from there.
I think in the first half they missed 16 shots, they had eight offensive rebounds.
(Duane) Posey was at Northwestern State last year. My team at McNeese guarded him better than we did. He was at Northwestern State. My front line at frickin’ McNeese could block him out. He got five of their eight offensive rebounds in the first half. He had six last time I checked. I don’t know what he ended with. What did he end with? Six.
I thought Scottie (Ebube) brought an edge to us. I thought he helped us.
But not good enough. Same guys, we make mistakes in shoot around, we make mistakes in practice, we make the same mistakes in the game. Same guys who foul all the time, because they have no attention to detail, and they make mistakes, and they just act all shocked when they foul in the game.
And that’s what we do.
You spoke about Paul a little bit right there, but when a player like that is hot, and you see it and recognize it, how does that kind of help the team kind of rise up and out of the way? And how do you kind of assess what was going on with him?
It’s pretty simple. You just go to this play sheet with all the calls for him and start dialing them up. But he was great. He was 8 for 40 the last five games coming into this one. So it was good to see him break out of that.
Stayed after yesterday to work. He stayed extra, everybody else went home. He was in the gym by himself. JoJo (Joseph Anderson), him and myself just sitting there working for an extra 45 minutes after our meal last night.
So you get what you earn. You get what you deserve. You get what you work on. And I’m proud of Paul.
Coach, you seem a little disappointed with this performance.
Yeah, I mean, give up the amount of points we gave up, offensive rebounds we gave up. Our attention to detail is lacking, our effort, our intensity on a consistent basis on every possession, it’s not where it needs to be. So we gotta get that fixed and quickly before Sunday.
We’re gonna play Ole Miss on Sunday, who is a great team. Well-coached, physical, tough, got great players. Malik Dia, is an All-SEC level player. AJ Storr’s been able to score it everywhere, Wisconsin, Kansas. and now Ole Miss. You’ve got a kid they brought in from France (Ilias Kamardine), who’s phenomenal.
So I mean, it’s gonna be a really, really tough game on Sunday. And a lot of the mistakes, a lot of the stuff we do here, not gonna cut it on Sunday.
You had your introductory press conference here, what was it like to coach here?
It’s awesome, great atmosphere, really, really cool environment. So loved being over here. It’s fun being here the last couple days. Been really cool. We appreciate Coach Moore letting us rent the place out a little bit, let us use their film room the last couple of days.
And so very, very appreciative of the women for letting us come over here, but it was really neat.
You mentioned Paul staying after last night. What’s it like as a coach to see a guy get rewarded for his work in a game like this?
Love it. Paul don’t complain. A lot of guys like to complain. He doesn’t ever complain. He just goes to work, figures it out, so I always stick with him. I make changes, but I usually stick with him, because I trust his work. I trust who he is, and look, I mean, he’s gonna struggle some. But he’s gonna have more good nights for us than bad nights.
He was in a little bit of a slump, and I’m just happy to see him get out of it. He got out of it in grand fashion, but very happy with him. He works hard. Very, very diligent with what we ask him to do. Very proud, and he deserves that, he deserves that.
What people don’t know is there was a concert in town before the scrimmage against South Carolina, the exhibition, the one where he hit the buzzer beater. While all the rest of the guys were at the concert, Paul was in the gym working. Not surprising he hit the game winner, but ‘My God, you drew the game winner up for Paul,’ well, yeah, no joke, he was the only guy in there working. Everybody else was at the YoungBoy concert.
It’s cool. You can go to a YoungBoy concert. I’m cool with that, but that’s what you get. That’s how Paul lives. That’s why I trust him. That’s why I love him.
Is that why you’ve tried different lineups, just to see if you can get some effort from the other guys?
Well, today, Darrion (Williams) was out. Not like we’ve got a flotilla of bigs, so we don’t have a whole lot of options.
Terrance (Arceneaux) has been sick as a dog. He was out the last couple of days. He just put on a uniform tonight, tried to use some minutes, and he’s been sick.
Pulled Jerry (Deng) off the shelf. He hadn’t played much the last couple of games. Played him 22 minutes.
Alyn’s (Breed) been solid for us.
So we’ll just change it around a little bit and see what we got. I mean, some of these bench guys wanna play more, but you put them in, you see why they don’t play. Look at them out there and see the scoreboard go the other way.
How do you get that consistency that you need?
We keep demanding it. It’ll break, eventually.
What was Texas Southern doing to limit paint touches?
Oh, we shot a bunch of threes. We shot a ton of threes, but most of them were pretty good shots. But I mean, think about some of the threes we took. It’s mind-numbing, some of the threes we take. And it’s mind-numbing.
But look, Texas Southern’s good. I mean, Posey’s tougher than most of the guys we got on our front line. They’re physical. We couldn’t guard them one-on-one, but they did a pretty good job guarding us one-on-one, keeping us out of the paint.
Couldn’t turn the corner on them, but they were right by us. They just missed a bunch of corner threes, and they whipped us on the baseline. They were whipping it. We changed our ball screen coverage two different times.
End of the 1.3 on the shot clock. They run the X play. We get slipped in front of. We went over that eight times in shoot around the day. Screwed it up six times, so we had to go over it eight times. And all of a sudden, boom, layup.
Not prepared on a baseline out of bounds on the far end in the second half. Layup and-one.
This shit gets you beat That’s five points we gave up on baseline out of bounds.
Now, today we actually screened for the first time all year in baseline out of bounds, and Paul got two open threes off the baseline out of bounds play. It’s amazing. When you screen, you get open. Unbelievable.
But the attention to detail on that stuff, that stuff, it’s fine…we beat Texas Southern, but that’s the sort of stuff that’s why we haven’t been able to beat Kansas, why we haven’t been able to beat Auburn, why we haven’t been able to beat these guys is because we make those same mistakes in those games, and they kill us, and we don’t get it corrected. And I’m tired of it, absolutely tired of it.
I’m not mad at y’all.
Scottie Ebube…
Yeah, Scottie plays with an edge. I’m the dumb ass for not playing him. I should play him more.
I mean, hey, when he’s in there, we got a lot of guys that go in there and are neutral. They’re like, they’re walking around on eggshells, trying not to do something or whatever. Hey, when he’s in there, something’s gonna happen.
Somebody’s band’s playing. Ours or theirs, but somebody’s playing. Something is going to happen. And that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing when he’s in there.
We got to put him in around the medias. We need to put him in around the medias. 4-5-minute spurts. Let him go in there and wreck things up. But he, I mean, shoot, he played 13 minutes, fouled out tonight. That’s what he does, that’s what he does, right? Made a free throw. That’s what he does. He brings a physicality to us.
I mean, hey, in the first half, that weak side block he had, that’s the first weak side block we’ve had all year. We just watch them lay it in. Talk about Kansas, the Kansas game, we got out of the way in the last six minutes of the game, we got out of the way of three shields that should have been blocks. That’s what lost us the game, not all the other stuff.
And Scottie’s the only guy we got that can come from the weak side and make the block off of a shield. We haven’t done that all year long. 11 games into the year, haven’t done it.
Scottie comes in, boom, like volleyball. Bats that thing all over the place.
How do you get the rest of the team to play with that kind of intensity and physicality?
You see, it’s tough. It’s tough. We got a lot of nice guys, got a lot of nice guys. Got a great team GPA, we got all that stuff. Over 3.0, got all that stuff. It’s wonderful.
We’re running the daycare. I am in academics. I was a teacher, I’m happy about 3.2, but we’re running a competitive basketball program, and quite frankly, I’ve been trying to get some urgency and some internal leadership, and I think Q’s (Quadir Copeland) done a pretty good job. Outside of Q and Ven (Allen Lubin), those guys are playing about as well as we can ask them to play.
We take on the personality, and we got a lot of casual personalities on our team. We don’t have people that are revved up and ready to go. I mean, I had one of the kids come to me, ‘Oh, I’m tough, I’m tough.’ I said, ‘Shit, you’re not in the top 50 of the toughest players I’ve coached. Not even the top 50. I don’t wanna hear that. You ain’t tough. You wouldn’t make the top 50. You wouldn’t make the top 25 of the last five years of who I’ve coached, and I sat out a year.’ I don’t wanna hear that.
Wen you got casual guys, I mean, it’s tough. It’s tough.
But I did think Ven and Q took a step forward with their leadership.
But like today in our shoot around, we made 88 mistakes in our shoot around. I chart all of it. We made 88 mistakes in our shoot around. We made 23 defensive errors, 13 offensive execution errors, 36 on those. The other ones were different, 36 errors on those. Our first team made 14, our second team made 22.
How the hell can you be on the second team and watch the first team do it and make eight more mistakes? You’re running the same stuff.
Casual, lack of attention to detail, lack of focus, and that’s great when you have somebody that sets the ACC record for made threes and the school record for made threes, but we’re relying on hope that one of these cats is gonna go ballistic every night. That’s what we rely on, just hope, and hope’s a bad strategy in my book.
Is it concerning that it’s taken this long to get things going?
It ain’t going. Shit, it’s concerning. It’s taken this long and we’re not there, and we got all high major games from here on out. Kindergarten’s over. We got all high major games from here on out. I mean, yeah, it’s concerning.
I played some of those kids and I made their Christmas. It’s gonna be miserable for me. I made their Christmas. They got Christmas present a week early. Play some of these guys.
But I mean, yeah, I’ve been concerned for weeks. I’ve been concerned for weeks. But I mean, this is, we are who we are. I said it a couple weeks ago, if you’re not physical and you’re not tough, you better be alert and aware, and we’re still none of the four. We’re not physical. We’re not tough. We’re not alert. We’re not aware.
If you’re alert and aware, you don’t give up five points on baseline out of bounds plays with the clock under three seconds. You just don’t do it. You just don’t do it. Our goal every game is to win baseline and sideline out of bounds by six plus. We never do it. We may have done it tonight, because we actually executed our inbounds plays, but we just don’t do it.
I mean, it’s beyond concerning. I mean, concerns like here, I mean, this is like a problem, major problem.
We’ll see. We’ve got to have some internal leadership. That’s what we gotta have. We’ve got to have internal leadership. We’ve got to have urgency. We’ve got to have intensity. We’ve got to have effort on every possession. We have to dominate possessions, dominate possessions.
And we just get through possessions, just hold on for dear life in possessions.
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