With North Carolina playing down in Tallahassee yesterday and Duke off until today’s game at Clemson, the press room at the Joel Coliseum was more packed than usual for yesterday’s game against N.C. State. So I had the great, good pleasure to see more of my old time friends than usual.
Getting to know and work with the sportswriters who cover the ACC is probably the best part about my job. I tell myself when I win the lottery I won’t go to many games. I’ve seen a few. But I would have to drop by from time to time just to catch up on so many buddies I’ve been through so much with over these past three decades.
One who is always a huge delight to see is Barry Jacobs, who you surely know as one of the preeminent authorities on ACC basketball. Jacobs would be a legend if for nothing else than the incomparable Fan’s Guide to ACC Basketball he produced in the 1990s and early 2000s. He taught us all new and compelling ways to look at a sport we’d been watching for years. But, luckily enough for us, he’s also churned out enough books, magazine and newspaper articles and website observations to keep ACC fans as informed as any you’ll find in the college basketball world.
Jacobs was good enough to chat with me before the game about what he has seen in the first week or so of the ACC regular season. Keep in mind our conversation took place before N.C. State ran Wake out of its own building and Florida State did to North Carolina what no one, Barry, I or anybody, thought we’d see done.
One week to the day after Jeff Bzdelik met with us media types to discuss what appeared to be a breakthrough 58-55 victory over Virginia Tech, he was back in the same seat yesterday to do what he could to explain a 76-40 meltdown against N.C. State.
There really wasn’t much to say, but he said it anyway.
From my seat at the scorer’s table, right next to where the officials huddle to review the monitor, I could see that Karl Hess and Bryan Kersey didn’t want to make a call that ejected Travis McKie from today’s game against N.C. State. I could see it in their eyes. As for the game, it was all over but the shouting by that time. And McKie is not a troublemaker. But they looked at the play once, and they looked at it again, and felt they had no choice.
So they called the Flagrant II technical that sent McKie to the locker room with 11 1/2 minutes remaining.
Later Brian Morrison, the ACC’s assistant commissioner for media relations, arranged that Lenox Rawlings and I could see the play as well. What many people don’t realize is that sportswriters, sitting courtside, are often at the mercy of fans at home watching a game and all its replays.
What I saw was McKie drive to his left, get stripped by Lorenzo Brown as he’s taking the ball up and, with his arms flying above his head, driving his elbow into Wood’s mouth. I saw what Hess and Kersey saw and I can’t argue with their call.
The savings grace is that because the foul did not involve fisticuffs, McKie’s penalty was over when the game ended. He’ll be eligible for Thursday’s game at Duke.
When coach Jeff Bzdelik had finished his post-game address, I made a bee-line to McKie and asked him about the play.
What happened?
“I was in the post,’’ McKie said. “I had the ball. I went up for a layup. I got stripped. The next thing I knew it was an offensive foul and I got ejected. And I can’t argue it. I didn’t intentionally try to hurt Scott. I think Scott knows that. I know that. We talked afterwards. I just had to respect the call and to leap forward.’‘
Did you recognize that you elbowed him?
“Not at all,’’ McKie said. “I thought they called a charge and he just fell and it was over with. I saw he got hit in the mouth and I told him `Are you all right?’ And he said `yeah,’
“They said I elbowed him in the mouth and I had to get thrown out. So I had to respect it.’‘
How much frustration was involved?
“When people look up to you to lead this team and carry the load of this team and you don’t do it and on top of that you get ejected it’s so sad,’’ McKie said. “So this is probably the worst game of my college career. This is a bad loss for us but I think this is a turning point for me individually. I think I need to do a lot more things off the court and on the court to help myself and my team get better. So I have to change.’‘
It’s to the great credit of Steve Shutt and Scott Wortman of the Wake media relations department that they made McKie available. It’s always been my contention that if a player is available when when he scores 25 at Maryland, then he needs to be available when he scores two and is ejected. But not everybody sees it that way.
Both McKie and Bzdelik said that they talked with Wood later and that Wood acknowledged the elbow was not intentional. I’ll have to take their word for it because N.C. State, as it so happened, only made two players available and Wood wasn’t one.
As much as I would like to profess otherwise, I never saw Wake’s 76-40 thrashing by N.C. State today coming.
It was pretty apparent by the stunned look in the Deacons eyes, nor did they.
And why should they have? Friday’s practice was so spirited, so crisp, so uplifting that the players, to a man, said they woke up this morning feeling great about where they were as a team and where they were headed.
“We were upbeat, we were ready to go, we were energized,’’ senior Ty Walker said. “I just thought it was going to be a much better game today.’‘
As did C.J. Harris.
“Spirits were high, everybody was laughing, having fun, playing hard,’’ Harris said.
And that may have been one reason why coach Jeff Bzdelik had so much trouble explaining how a team that scored 40 points in the second half of Wednesday’s 70-64 loss at Maryland managed only 40 in the whole game against the Wolfpack today. The Deacons shot 25 percent in the first half, 29 for the game and finished with only 16 field goals on 55 attempts and two 3-pointers on 20 heaves.
“Guys were upbeat,’’ Bzdelik said. “We were moving through things, we felt good coming off the second half of the Maryland game. I felt good about today’s game. I really did.
“And to see us kind of just kind of sleepwalk through offense. We got hit and bumped and teams are going to do that.
“This is a league for men only.’‘
I’m not as quick as most to say that one coach out-coaches another. But today, sitting courtside, I heard the Wolfpack assistant coaches yelling to their players, telling them where the Deacons were going to be before they got there. When Wake set its ball screens at the foul line extended, the defender was waiting for the cutter as he was coming around, bumping him off his stride and stopping up all flow of the offense.
“We dealt with their ball screens,’’ coach Mark Gottfried said. “They set a lot of them. And I thought we defended those really well.
“In late-clock situations they like the high ball screen in the middle of the floor. We defended that really well. And that took away a lot of things they’ve been really good at the last couple of games.’‘
The Deacons afterward went on and on about how rugged the Wolfpack were.
“They’re extremely physical,’’ Harris said. “I mean, we didn’t push back when they pushed us, coming through the lane and stuff like that. And that’s something we can’t allow to happen.
“Another team cannot be more physical than us.’‘
And when they are, it’s not a pretty sight.
“You could tell five minutes into the game we had no offensive flow,’’ freshman Chase Fischer said. “No one was screening, no one was moving. And that’s a problem when you have that.
“It’s usually the other way around. There’s usually no defensive intensity. You always have offensive intensity. But tonight we didn’t have that on offense and it’s hard to score when you don’t have that.’‘
The loss had to be one of the most disheartening of Bzdelik’s time at Wake, if for no other reason because no one saw the haymaker before it landed.
“Well first of all give N.C. state credit,’’ Bzdelik said. “They physically hit us every time we went to move, combined with the fact that we had absolutely no offensive intensity. . . We weren’t cutting hard to get open, we weren’t screening, reading screens, using screens, setting screens. We were kind of walking through our offense and that’s not not going to work.’‘
Bzdelik called one timeout to stop the flow and then he called another. Nothing worked.
“During timeouts I was calm from the standpoint of `Guys, this is what needs to be done here. And just execute. And set screens. You can’t walk through offense,’’ Bzdelik said. “We talk about defensive intensity. There has to be offensive intensity where you’re cutting hard and reading how they’re playing you and you’re cutting to get open.
“I can vividly remember several plays where we’re just walking to get the ball, and they’re denying us. Well you’ve got to set your man up and cut hard and catch it and rip it, set screens, use screens. I just think it got the best of them because they want to do well. They do.’‘
The first time I talked with Travis McKie was by phone, after he had committed to play for Wake Forest. I was struck by how articulate, loquacious even, that he was, and nothing I have encountered since has caused me to alter my first impression.
He’s majoring in communications, which would fit. He communicates well, so well I fully expect to see him on television one day as an analyst or personality. That’s of course after his 12-year NBA career.
I caught up with McKie to talk with him about tomorrow’s game against N.C. State. The video is still a bit rough as I learn my way around the camera. But stick with me and I’ll stick with it.
There’s something to be said about a player waiting for the game to come to him. The problem is when the game takes too long to get there.
Wake lost to Maryland 70-64 tonight because it couldn’t guard without fouling or lock down its defensive boards well enough to overcome a sluggish start. The Deacons fouled 28 times, allowing the Terps to shoot 24 percent in the second half while making only seven field goals and still slip away with the win.
But Wake would have never found itself in a 34-16 first-half hole if C.J. Harris, the ACC’s second-leading scorer, had been more productive early. Instead he took only six field-goal attempts in the game’s first 25 minutes while the Terps, behind the ACC’s leading scorer Terrell Stoglin, were making hay.
Harris played well enough down the stretch for a player in the throes of foul trouble, scoring eight points in the final 14 minutes to finish with 10. But on a night Travis McKie was pouring in 25 points and Ty Walker (eight points, nine rebounds, eight blocks) was playing like the player he was once upon a time projected to be, the Deacons needed something more to throw at Maryland to pull off a second-straight upset.
The main reason I like Harris’ game so much may is he is a consummate team player and he doesn’t force bad shots. And one of the most impressive accomplishments of the early season is that Harris is scoring 18 points a game totally within the flow of the Deacons’ offense. But since returning from the strained groin that sidelined him against Wofford, he has attempted only 19 field goals in 70 minutes of play. He did hit the two biggest shots of Saturday’s victory over Virginia Tech, but lost in the celebration was that, up until crunch tiime, Harris had taken only six shots and made one.
I asked him tonight if perhaps he could help the team more by being more assertive early.
“As a player, you just have to go with the game offensively—moving the ball, everybody touching it, finding the open man, attack and attack for others,’’ Harris explained. “And that’s just something that definitely works. If we stick to that, we’ll be fine.’‘
I posed the question to coach Jeff Bzdelik as well, if perhaps Harris could help the team by coming out of the gates more aggressively.
“Within the framework of what we’re doing,’’ Bzdelik replied. ‘And he had a couple of good looks there too that he just didn’t make.
“They did a good job of keying on him, but others have to help us out there too by scoring.’‘
It’s apparent 16 games into the season that Wake has too many flaws to be a great team. The Deacons are weak on the boards, they blow too many prime scoring opportunities and they have a short bench. But they do have, in Harris and McKie, two of the ACC’s most prolific scorers. When both are on their game, they can cause problems for even good teams. When one of the other—or both—are sputtering, there’s not enough left to take up the slack.
Jeff Bzdelik wasn’t being paranoid when he said the whole world is against him and his basketball team.
Instead he was just being a coach.
To those who say the two terms are interchangeable, I’ll submit that I’ve worked with a string of coaches at Wake who have proven differently. But every coach I’ve ever known here or anywhere would use pretty much anything he or she could write on blackboard to get another victory, another strong effort, even another point, from their team.
And what Bzdelik is using with increasing frequency is the notion that nobody on the planet is giving the Deacons a chance at anything. He sounded the theme loud and clear at yesterday’s practice attended also by my esteemed colleague Edward G. Robinson III of the Raleigh News and Observer.
“The world gives us no chance,’’ Bzdelik said. “The outside world gives us no chance. But all we’re concerned about is our little world right inside here within our team. There’s a reason you play the game. So all we can control is how hard we play, how well we play and our mindset. And we’ll just take it one game at a time and all I can say is we’re going to show up.
“The last time I looked they haven’t thrown us out of the ACC.’‘
What, Robinson pressed, did he want to see from his team? The question was all Bzdelik needed to return to his point of the day.
“Just a team that’s gritty, tough and hard-playing in a collective way,’’ Bzdelik said. “That’s all. Just a team that knows that nobody else believes in us but we believe in ourselves. We know that the bottom line in this business is to win, but we’re going to show up.
“This is a really good group of young men and they care. They care about wearing Wake Forest across their chest, they care about playing the game the right way, they care about each other. So we know what gives us a chance to be competitive, we know what it takes to put ourselves in a position to win. And that is to play as hard as we can individually and collectively and play as well as we can.
“This is who we are and what we have and we will show up. I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way, I just mean, hey, we’re going to do everything we can to maximize our opportunity to win.’‘
Spent the afternoon messing around with my new Christmas toy, a Samsung video camera that I hope can enhance the viewing experience of the Macadamia Nut Gallery on My Take on Wake. What we have here is my favorite moment from Jeff Bzdelik’s post-game conference after Saturday’s 58-55 victory over Virginia Tech. The first voice you hear is that of my good buddy Sam Walker of the Gold Rush asking Bzdelik the question.
There was this new player playing for Wake at today’s practice. He looked pretty good. Heard he had to step in when Aaron Ingle turned his ankle in a weight room mishap. He might be able to help the Deacons, that is if he has any eligibility left.
Virginia Tech got caught in the grinder of Wake’s patient open-post motion offense Saturday and didn’t make it out alive.
Already the Deacons have proven, if nothing else, to be a bigger pain to play than a season ago. C.J. Harris and Travis McKie, currently No. 2 and No. 3 in the ACC in scoring, have to be reckoned with and the size of Ty Walker and Carson Desrosiers can cause problems inside.
But what really ruined the Hokies day yesterday was having to guard the Deacons for 20, 25 and sometimes even 30 seconds before getting the ball back. It’s a strategy coaches have been using to compensate for a lack of talent pretty much from the time James Naismith nailed the peach basket to the wall. But if it didn’t work, coaches wouldn’t keep doing it. And the Deacons, in their two biggest victories of the season, have done it rather well.
“I think they wanted to shorten the game,’’ coach Seth Greenberg of Virginia Tech said. “There’s no doubt about it.
“They wanted to control the tempo, shorten the game, get us out of transition and be in position to do what they did – have the ball on the last possession with a chance to win it. If you look at the games they’ve won – whether it was Nebraska – those are the games that they’ve been able to control the tempo. It’s a credit they were able to.’‘
It takes a team to execute such a strategy, something—as I’ve said before—the Deacons didn’t have a year ago. Instead they had an assemblage of players.
This year they have a team. It’s not a great team and on certain nights it won’t even be a good team. But it’s a team.
“You can’t play basketball if you’re not a team,’’ freshman Chase Fischer said. “And every team struggles with that. Some of it’s intentional. Some of it’s unintentional.
“When we don’t play like a team it’s unintentional, and I think that’s a really big thing, because we don’t have any selfish guys on this team. We do have one common goal and that’s to win.’‘
One game into the conference season, the Deacons have already accomplished one essential goal that eluded them throughout the lost season of 2010-11. And that’s a start—a pretty good one at that.
