Better late than never, we figured readers wanted to comment on the game last night.
The Wolpack fall in Coach Lowe’s first ACC game against #25 Virginia but managed to impress in the process. . No doubt that the Wolfpack got tired as the game progressed, as Tom Suiter points out in this entry.
State could have. They almost did, but in the end they couldn’t beat Virginia in their ACC opener. Sixty-seven-62, Virginia. Fourteen lead changes in this game. State had the chance to steal an ACC win on the road: 62-62 with 1:25 left.
Now, the Wolfpack got Virginia to play the kind of game they wanted. Limited the Cavaliers in transition, but you know and I know and everybody knows that good teams will wear this thin State team down, and the Pack didn’t have the juice in the end. Depth is just not there, and with senior Engin Atsur a spectator with the bad hamstring, Coach Sidney Lowe was hamstrung even more in what he wanted to do. The Pack played just seven players with four of those going 38 or more minutes.
…But State simply doesn’t have enough bodies.
I am convinced that NC State would have won that game if Engin Atsur was healthy. Just look at the point totals of the starters and imagine Atsur’s presence in the boxscore:
Nieman 4
Costner 17
McCauley 12
Fells 11
Grant 15
Just five to seven minutes of rest for Gavin Grant and Courtney Fells can make a world of difference on both ends of the floor of the Pack. Atsur and Trevor Ferguson’s return will definitely help boost the team’s prospects the rest of the year.
The BEST part of the entire day came on the last shot of the day (by Brandon Costner) that the Pack actually missed. Ken Tysiac of the Charlotte Observer – who never expressed the following ‘observation’ when Herb Sendek was coaching at NC State – said it this way:
N.C. State coach Sidney Lowe does an excellent job getting the shot he wants when he calls timeout to set up a play. Predecessor Herb Sendek did a great job scouting opponents’ tendencies, but he seldom set up a good play during a timeout.
An email from a friend of mine expressed the feeling this way:
wide open looks coming out of a timeout at the end of the game
he should have passed it 5 more times, then shot it off the side of the backboard.
At least we didn’t get a technical for sending six players on the court
Section Six has some super comments about the game.
If the effort and poise are there, everything else is gravy. It seems like there is a pleasant surprise for us every time the Pack takes the court; in this case, it was the way we handled our first tough road environment. Virginia was one of the best home teams in conference play last season–in particular, the Cavs’ offense averaged 1.12 points/possession. Today they scored 67 points on 66 possessions: 1.01 points/possession.
For the fourth straight game, Gavin Grant used over 30% of the team’s possessions while on the court. His usage today (33.8%) was crazy-high. Here’s last season’s leaderboard in the usage category. What Gavin does with all those possessions naturally has a large influence on the team’s overall efficiency; he’s been bad the last couple of games and the team has as well. But I don’t want to be too hard on Gavin what with Atsur sidelined. With Engin, we’ve got five guys on the court who can score. Without Engin, we’ve got four scorers and a fifth guy who basically just takes up space. That fifth man is using very few possessions, a good bit less than Atsur had been using, so that leaves some workload to be redistributed among the other four guys on the court–and those extra possessions are going to Gavin, rightfully or wrongfully. Grant’s turnover rate is fine, and he continues to do a good job getting everyone else involved.
