By Noah Fleischman
As NC State coach Kevin Keatts ascended up the blue and yellow Werner ladder after the Wolfpack clinched a spot in the Final Four inside the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, his national sensation big man had a message for everyone around.
“Give him his respect,” graduate forward DJ Burns Jr. repeated four times while the seventh-year coach took a moment on the metal frame of the ladder. Keatts then turned around, gave a fist pump to the thousands of fans clad in red and white that made the trip south, before he cut the last thread of the net.
Keatts then waved the net around on the top step, and Burns repeated himself one more time to make sure his message was received.
Well, it was.
His coach, who uttered “Kevin Keatts is a winner” at his introductory press conference in 2017, proved that he is. But to get to this point — the Wolfpack’s first Final Four appearance since 1983 — Keatts and the rest of the red and white had a bumpy road.
The Pack, which at one point seemed like it was going to not even live up to its preseason No. 7 pick in the ACC poll, used the postseason as a blank slate. That has served as the biggest motivator for a team playing with nothing to lose. It culminated with a trip to college basketball’s final weekend in Phoenix.
The meeting that changed the mindset
After NC State lost its regular-season finale, an 81-73 defeat at Pittsburgh for the team’s fourth straight loss, the Wolfpack had a team meeting. Everyone was there, from the players and coaches to support staff.
The get-together would have happened either way, whether it was a win or a loss in the Steel City, but it was key in setting expectations for the postseason. NC State clinched the 10-seed in the ACC Tournament before the loss, meaning it would have to play on the first day of the event, but Keatts set forth what he wanted to see from his roster.
Keatts viewed the ACC Tournament as a new season. Yes, it would be a challenge to win five games in as many days to cut the nets down at Capital One Arena, but that is what he set as the goal. NC State needed to win it to make the NCAA Tournament. Any loss would most likely send the Wolfpack home to Raleigh without a bid to March Madness.
The coach laid out NC State’s most likely path to the tournament championship game, and he showed his team that the Pack could play with all of those foes.
The Wolfpack beat Louisville in the regular season, so it had confidence in the opener. It lost both games to Syracuse during the season, but it was able to surge back in the second half of those games. Duke, the probable quarterfinal matchup, pulled away in the second half in Raleigh. Then there was Virginia, which NC State beat at home and went to overtime with on the road, while North Carolina beat the Wolfpack in Chapel Hill after the red and white had an 8-point lead at halftime.
“All of the teams that we were going to play, we were in the game [in the regular season],” graduate guard DJ Horne said. “It felt like we just shot ourselves in the foot most of the time. Little mistakes here and there could have gotten us wins. It was definitely an uplifting, confidence-boosting speech that I think everybody took heed to, and we went in there with a lot of confidence.”
That speech from Keatts, and the overall meeting for the Wolfpack, helped lift the team’s confidence. How much? They went from thinking how long until they would lose to the realization that an ACC championship was not far-fetched.
“That made a big impact because after the last game of the year, everybody’s mind and everybody was thinking, ‘Oh, what are we going to do next year?’” junior forward Mohamed Diarra said. “We can’t say we don’t think we’re not going to win the ACC Tournament because we compete, but we were like, ‘We’re the 10-seed, it’s going to be tough.’”
“After this meeting, everybody’s mind changed, and everybody played with a sense of desperation because we can make a run,” Diarra continued. “We deserve more. I think the biggest difference is everybody accepted their role and played for the team more than themselves.”
NC State knew it had the talent, and now the entire team was ready to play their role. That meant graduate guard Michael O’Connell would be the primary ball-handler at the point, while Horne was the starting shooting guard to fill up the bucket from the perimeter. Graduate guard Casey Morsell was in the scoring and defense role, while Diarra’s prime objective was to grab rebounds. And for Burns? Score.
The Wolfpack was confident in its roster, but it needed to clean up the things that had cost it games during the season. There were multiple improvements to make, and they were written on the whiteboard in the Wolfpack’s locker room.
“They’ve been wanting to do well,” NC State assistant Joel Justus said of the team’s drive to improve. “To be honest with you, when we would dive into it, it wasn’t always the same thing. I think that’s what was frustrating to us, but also to the guys, as there was always something. It’s not the same thing.”
Ball-screen defense needed to improve, and so did the Pack’s transition defense, but the biggest area was eliminating the prolonged scoring droughts. NC State seemed to always hit a second-half wall in the regular season, which would allow the other teams to take control of the games. The Pack’s goal was to find a consistent way to score to avoid those gaps.
“I think when you go back, there was always a period in those games that we beat ourselves,” Justus said. “In our league, you can’t do that. There’s going to come a period where the other team is going to try to beat you, too.”
NC State was able to tweak its defense, which allowed it to have a much-improved offense. The Wolfpack came up with a plan to not press as much in the postseason, something it tried to use to its advantage to force turnovers in the regular season. The goal was to not string its team out on the floor, opting to clamp down in the half court on defense, while also playing with an efficient offense in the half court.
The idea was to also keep Burns out of foul trouble since he would not have to panic to get back on defense. In turn, that would create a highly effective offense for the Wolfpack with Burns’ nearly unstoppable post moves in the paint.
Keatts’ final message was to have a complete execution of the game plan. That cost the Wolfpack in multiple regular-season games (Syracuse’s Chris Bell hitting 8 first-half three-pointers is a prime example), but if they could follow it for 40 minutes, it would be a recipe for success.
That meeting, in turn, provided an important reflection point for the Wolfpack, which had its goals right in front of it. It would just need a near-flawless week of basketball to accomplish those.
“We just sat down and we were like, these are the things we have to fix,” junior forward Ben Middlebrooks said. “These are the goals that we set out for at the beginning of the year. And at that point, we hadn’t reached the standard that we had set for ourselves. We still had an opportunity to do big things if we still believed in it.”
A belief to win
NC State had the plan laid out for it. But now it needed to believe in it. It did not take long for the red and white to begin speaking it into existence when the Pack arrived in the nation’s capital to prepare for the ACC Tournament.
Morsell, the team’s longest-tenured starter in his third season on the roster, was the first to put the team’s mindset out there.
“Right now, it’s a new season — a fresh start,” Morsell said after the team’s open practice ahead of the ACC Tournament. “Having the opportunity to get the momentum going heading into the tournament. That’s all we can do, just focus on being 1-0, that’s the mindset.”
While Morsell believed in it, Horne took it to a new level. The team was playing desperately, and it could lay it all out there with its back against the wall.
“We have nothing at all to lose,” Horne said at the time. “Anything is possible going into these tournaments. March is crazy, I know you see it every year. Anything is possible, and why not us?”
It seems like Horne could see into the future because what followed was something that anyone outside of NC State’s locker room was likely not expecting. They were able to win five games in as many days to claim the ACC Tournament championship, its first since 1987.
The Wolfpack viewed the run through the league tournament as a revenge tour. They were a combined 2-6 against the teams they played, but NC State earned the wins when they mattered most.
“I’d say we used it as motivation going into it — the disrespect that we were getting, our coach and us as players, every night, when we lost those games, just complete disrespect,” Burns said. “And we took it personally, and I think that that’s kind of what the driving force was. Some of those teams that we played against, they had disrespected us as well and we were just tired of it, honestly.”
The Wolfpack, which trailed 15-seed Louisville by 12 points in the first eight minutes of the first-round game, stormed back to beat the Cardinals by nine. Then, the red and white knocked off Syracuse in the second round by 18 points, sending the Orange home after one game in the District.
NC State was able to advance to the quarterfinals against Duke, and it handled the Blue Devils with a 74-69 win. That set up a semifinal appearance, the first one since 2014, for the Pack against Virginia — a team it played well in the regular season.
But that contest was a tight one. Virginia ended up taking a six-point lead with less than a minute in the contest, before NC State cut the deficit to 3 with a trio of free throws from Morsell with 44 seconds left.
The Pack, though, had fate on its side in the contest.
Virginia’s Isaac McKneely, the team’s best free throw shooter, missed the front end of a 1-and-1 with just over five seconds left in the game. Morsell grabbed the rebound and pushed the ball to O’Connell near midcourt. He took five dribbles before uncorking a highly contested three-pointer just before the buzzer sounded.
Implausibily, it went in, and the Pack kept its season alive — somehow.
From there, NC State dominated the overtime period, running through Burns and beat Virginia 73-65 to make the ACC title game.
But O’Connell’s buzzer-beater provided a product of the Wolfpack’s belief that it had going into the tournament. It knew it could compete with the other teams in the league, and that all but hammered that in the red and white’s heads.
“We had always felt we could win these games, that was never really an issue,” Middlebrooks said. “That really cemented it. That was a magical moment, and this is a magical run that we’re doing. It really put a special emphasis on everything we’ve done so far.”
From afar, former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski watched it happen. And as a coach that won 15 ACC Tournament titles with 13 Final Four appearances, that belief was very noticeable.
“When a team believes in each other, their coach, they find that belief, their offense, defense, everything goes better with belief,” Krzyzewski said on his podcast. “It’s not Xs and Os. It’s belief. I call it finding religion. NC State found religion in the ACC Tournament.”
“From that time on, they’re playing lights out,” the legendary coach added. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t play fairly well before then, but it went up a whole lot. They’re the epitome of a team of what happens in March. I think there are some teams that find themselves in March, State is that team.”
After that, NC State had a different sense of confidence about itself. It won four games in a row and was just 40 minutes from punching its ticket to the NCAA Tournament — the only team in its way was archrival North Carolina.
But in the ACC Championship game, the Wolfpack never seemed to be threatened. The Pack trailed by one point at the half, but used a 45-point second half to beat the Tar Heels 84-76 to win the title behind Horne’s 29-point outburst on a bum hip.
While Horne had a nearly 30-point effort, he was one of four players to lead the Pack in scoring during the ACC Tournament. Morsell led the way against Louisville, while junior guard Jayden Taylor did so against Syracuse. Horne paced the Pack in the win over Duke and Burns did the same in the overtime win over Virginia.
NC State’s scoring depth proved it was a team that could win in March — something that it struggled with, at times, in the regular season, relying on Burns and Horne.
“I think this group is different because we can do it in different ways,” Keatts said. “We have the ability to score inside. We have the ability for those guards to really play well. You know, on any given night one of these guys can lead us in scoring. … We can have games now where one of our best players might not have their greatest game but somebody else can lead us.”
The Wolfpack found a way to win five games in as many days in Washington, D.C., becoming the first ACC team to do so. It was just the second power conference team to do that ever, joining the 2011 UConn squad won the Big East and went on to win the national championship behind Kemba Walker’s lights-out shooting.
That Huskies’ squad was brought up in the locker room postgame, but the Wolfpack did not want to claim that. They were enjoying the moment after the marathon of a week. But those five contests did something for the red and white — it gave the Pack momentum that it was in dire need of in the regular season.
“That entire run was crazy, beating Virginia, UNC and Duke in a row,” Middlebrooks said. “After that, we felt unstoppable.”
Momentum in March
The Wolfpack partied in the locker room at Capital One Arena, spraying water around the small space before getting on a plane bound for Raleigh. The Pack had less than 24 hours before it found out who it would face in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
It was a goal the team set in the preseason, and now, they were living it.
The Pack celebrated the NCAA Tournament bid with hundreds of Wolfpack fans at Sports & Social in Cary before they learned their destination for the first weekend: against Texas Tech in Pittsburgh.
NC State arrived back in the Steel City, where it was two weeks before on a sour note. But this time around, the Wolfpack oozed confidence, and it was not hard to find.
“I felt like coming into this tournament, we definitely have a lot of confidence,” Horne said before NC State’s date with the Red Raiders. “All along, we knew we were a good team. We just had some ups and downs throughout the season. So, to be able to pull it all together for a great conference tournament run and ultimately winning it, definitely coming into this with a lot of confidence.”
NC State rode the momentum it built in the ACC Tournament against Texas Tech, an elite shooting team from the physical Big 12 Conference. The Wolfpack was not afraid to play physically with the Red Raiders, and that led to a dominant 80-67 win.
Welcome to a red-hot team in March.
The Pack earned its first win in the NCAA Tournament under Keatts over the Red Raiders, and moved into the second round for the first time since 2015 to face 14-seed Oakland. The Golden Grizzlies, which featured a lights-out three-point shooter in Jack Gohlke, were riding a hot stretch similar to the Wolfpack. Oakland beat 3-seed Kentucky to reach the Round of 32, but NC State was prepared for everything it sent the Pack’s way.
NC State was able to survive Oakland’s ability to force overtime and ultimately outlasted the NCAA Tournament’s Cinderella team, 79-73, sending the Pack to the second weekend of the tournament for the first time since that 2015 campaign.
“We bent a little bit, but we never broke,” Keatts said after the win over Oakland. “I thought one of the biggest things for us was our character really shined through when we needed it. We stepped up in many ways. … At times things weren’t going our way. And it just shows you the growth of this team and how they’re locked in and they’re focused, and their love for one another and how they play for one another, it’s been very impressive. This run we’ve been on is really, really good.”
NC State survived its first close test of the NCAA Tournament and was set to face 2-seed Marquette, a top-10 program all season, in the Sweet 16. The Wolfpack left Pittsburgh with the Golden Eagles on their mind, whom they would face six days later at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
The Pack had not played the Golden Eagles in the Big Dance since the 1974 national championship game, NC State’s first of two NCAA titles in program history. Its date with Marquette in the Sweet 16 presented another challenge for the Wolfpack, but its defense answered the bell.
NC State held one of the country’s best offenses to 58 points as the Wolfpack raced past the Golden Eagles to make the Elite Eight. The red and white held a prolific three-point shooting team to a 4-for-31 clip from beyond the arc.
The Wolfpack’s ability to defend the three-point line allowed NC State to continue its run through the NCAA Tournament — and it set up another showdown with Duke in the Elite Eight.
NC State did not start round three with Duke in a good way. The Wolfpack shot under 27 percent from the field in the opening 20 minutes, which left it in a six-point hole at the break. That was the Pack’s biggest deficit of the NCAA Tournament at halftime, but NC State did not flinch.
“I would say in tough situations, you rise to the level of our training, and our coaches well prepared us,” Burns said.
Instead, it was the opposite. NC State came out firing in the second half. The Pack shot 72 percent from the field while it limited the Blue Devils to 32.3 percent, the lowest any team shot against NC State this season.
That swing in shooting percentages allowed the Pack to cruise to a 76-64 win over the Blue Devils, punching its ticket to the Final Four.
“God is good,” Keatts said afterwards. “These young men in the locker room from Day 1 have kind of believed in everything that I’ve preached to them and everything that they talked about.”
NC State’s trip to the Final Four was a pivotal moment for Keatts’ legacy in Raleigh. He went from being on the proverbial hot seat at the end of the regular season after losing 10 of its last 14 games to securing something only Norm Sloan and Jim Valvano did at NC State.
For Pack assistant Kareem Richardson, who was with Keatts as an assistant together at Louisville, this run means more than just basketball.
“For me, it’s really personal and pretty cool because Coach Keatts is a dear friend of mine,” Richardson said in the locker room after the Pack clinched a spot in the Final Four. “It doesn’t go without saying, there was a lot of noise out there coming into the ACC Tournament and for me to be a small part of it for a dear friend of mine and to see his success, is really cool.”
NC State’s turnaround was engineered by that team meeting put on by Keatts, which allowed the Wolfpack to know what it needed to do to make its dreams become a reality. While it seemed like a long shot, the Pack did exactly that, winning nine straight elimination games to get to Phoenix.
NC State Athletic Director Boo Corrigan, who would have been the one with a decision to make if the Pack was bounced early from the ACC Tournament, beamed with excitement after he watched the team make the Final Four.
There is nothing more he could have asked for.
“Coach Keatts, he’s got something about him,” Corrigan said as confetti fell in Dallas. “He never quit, the team never quit. Obviously they’ve been connected the whole year with the work they’ve done the whole year. They stayed together. All of the sudden, you tie together two halves and it gets better and better. They’ve never wavered the whole year.”
Keatts and his staff helped tie everything together, and now they are in the Final Four, looking for two more wins to earn the program’s first national championship since 1983.
For Horne, a Cary native who returned home to bring hardware back to PNC Arena, that self-belief in the locker room has led to where NC State is now. They have fought to get to this point, and Horne does not expect that to stop when the Pack faces top-seeded Purdue on Saturday night at State Farm Stadium in Phoenix.
“Everybody is on the same page, the level of talent that we have on this team, we’re not really worried about anything else going on other than the guys in our own locker room,” Horne said. “I would just say that from every game the fight that each of us play with for our brothers, it’s unmatched. We’re going to ride it until the wheels fall off.”
Taylor, one of NC State’s elite on-ball defenders, put it best as the Wolfpack continued its historic dash through the postseason.
“We have a crazy amount of momentum right now,” Taylor said. “We want it all right now. We’re doing things nobody’s done before, and that keeps on driving us.”
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