I don’t think it’s an outrageous ask for the NC State men’s basketball team to just not embarrass itself in Chapel Hill on a regular basis, and yet here we are after yet another drubbing, this time by a Tar Heels team that probably won’t even make the NCAA tournament. Embarrassing.
I don’t use the word, “embarrassed.” They played better than us. They made more shots than us. They got more rebounds than us. We fought. They won the game. The game was probably won in the first half. Our guys really, really battled in the second half when we had such a deep hole that we had to climb out of it. Are we proud of the way we played in the first half? Absolutely not. We’re not embarrassed. We’re not proud about how we played. Obviously, we wish we could have played better, but we didn’t.
At NC State we prefer the phrase “heinously non-triumphant,” as opposed to “embarrassed,” as the latter implies too much self-ownership of our problems.
It’s a little frustrating. We’re getting good shots. Unfortunately for us, some nights, they don’t go in, and when they don’t, it’s so much pressure on our defense. For the first time in a long time, when we started missing the shots, I think it really affected us on the defensive end. I’m not going to take away from Carolina because I thought it played really well in the first half, but a lot of that is we just weren’t ourselves.
Should it be concerning that the man with the best view of the team on a nightly basis doesn’t understand that in fact that performance perfectly encapsulated what this team is? Yeah, probably, but who has the time.
NC State has played eight true road games and given up at least 1.08 points per possession in all of them. It has allowed 1.1 PPP or more in six of them, and over 1.2 PPP in four, including last night. It’s a bad defensive team and its defense hasn’t traveled even once this season. That’s who this team is. Last night hit an extreme, but it’s not new. None of this is new.
Keatts’ team ranks 17th in effective field goal percentage in league games, and has shot above the national average (50.9%) in only five of 15 games, but he repeatedly marches out the “we got good shots and they just didn’t go in” bit as though that were an aberration. It isn’t.
This team doesn’t have any superstars. We’ve got really good players, and I love my players, but in fairness, there is no Jarkel Joiner, Terquavion Smith, D.J. Horne, and D.J. Burns. What I mean by that is guys that can go on and average 17, 18 points a game. We have a bunch of really good players, which I knew from the start, and I love them. I think they’re all really good people. They’re fighting their butts off. The disconnect is when we don’t play together with this particular group because we don’t have that one or two guys that can take a game over. When we’re not on the same page and we don’t play good basketball together, then we really struggle. Hence, when we start playing together, we’re a really good basketball team. Does NIL have something to do with that? Absolutely. All you’ve got to do is take a look at the top five teams in the league and somehow find their numbers. It’ll tell you a story, but I’m not going to make excuses about that because, obviously [in] our program, we fight hard, and we compete.
I don’t know what point Keatts is trying to make by tying NIL into this disaster—you most likely recall that Joiner, Horne, and Burns were all transfers. The 2025 team isn’t the regrettable result of just not having the money to bring in decent players, it’s the result of a terrible misevaluation by Keatts of his roster and its strengths and weaknesses.
NC State ranks 307th in three-point attempt rate and 283rd in 3FG%. This team is playing 1975-ball in 2025, which is one reason why its ceiling is as low as it is. Keatts prioritized the wrong things in the offseason, and it wasn’t the budget that talked him into thinking Mike O’Connell was going to be a good full-time point guard in the ACC.
Keatts needs to own these problems but won’t, instead opting to spew a bunch of nonsense as he maintains a healthy distance from culpability. He’s got one more offseason to sort this out, and hey, at least this team is going to give him an early start.