NC State head coach Will Wade met with Wolfpack Sports Network to discuss the 96-90 overtime loss on the road at Notre Dame.
Coach, disappointing ballgame here in overtime to Notre Dame. Take me through the last three minutes or so of regulation. You’re up seven. Let’s break that down for me. What happened late? You mentioned this a little bit in Dallas, you mentioned against Miami—what happened here against Notre Dame?
Yeah, I mean, they went zone late, and we got some good looks, but we need to drive the ball and draw some fouls. We just—we just didn’t finish off, didn’t finish off plays against the zone. And I said we had good shots, but you can’t turn into a jump-shooting team against the zone. You’ve got to be able to get the ball in the middle and drive it, and we just weren’t able to do that. It ended with a bunch of empty possessions where we couldn’t score, and it was a game where we couldn’t stop them.
And so it’s a game where we had to score to keep up, and when we don’t score down the stretch there, then it was really difficult for us to keep up. So that’s where the game got away from us. But it’s the same one. It’s a little bit different than the Miami game, but the same thing. I mean, we’ve lost four out of five. We’ve given away really two of the four losses. We’ve pretty much had the game, and we were in control of the game almost the entire game today, and we just gave it away. We just gave it away at the end here.
Started hot from three, seven of twelve in the first half, 58%. You end three of 22 after that, out of halftime. Was it the zone? You mentioned some of the looks were good, but you were a jump-shooting team—22 attempts is 10 more than you took in the first half. To what do you attribute that? Was it just missing shots on the road? It just happens?
Yeah, we just missed shots. I think most of the looks were pretty good looks. We had maybe a couple that were tough. I can think of one or two that were tough, but most of the looks were pretty good looks. And then you play like we do, and you live by the three, you kind of die by the three as well. And so, disappointing.
We tried to—I wanted to get the ball into Ven a little bit more there. I thought Ven was phenomenal, but I wanted to get the ball into him a little bit more. And I think that we just weren’t able to accomplish that, and thus we ended up taking a bunch of threes.
How tough is Haralson to stop once he gets a head of steam down there to the basket?
Yeah, I mean, look, they just picked at matchups. They did a great job picking at matchups and stirring up the defense. And it was really—they went at us and really took advantage of the mismatches.
And Haralson’s a great player, and certainly he did a great job. We let him get loose early. He had three threes there early in the game, which he saw go in. So this was his third 30-point ACC game. But look, it’s just been a common theme for us this season to have these types of issues, and just really disappointing. Just really disappointing.
And I didn’t have us, obviously, ready as we needed to be. They played more desperately than we did. We’re fighting for the NCAA Tournament; they’re fighting for the ACC Tournament. And the fact that they were a little bit more desperate than we were, fighting for the ACC Tournament, is really a pretty big indictment on me and having our guys ready, which is really, really disappointing.
