Kevin Keatts: Duke Had All the Winning Plays

NC State coach says Duke won "round two"

Kevin Keatts had plenty of praise for Duke after the Blue Devils evened the season series at 1-1 with an 88-69 win at Cameron on Monday night.

“Guys, give Duke a lot of credit,” he said. “I thought they did a tremendous job on round two, and we say round two because, obviously, it was a little different than two weeks ago when we played them in Raleigh (an 88-66 NC State win).”

Duke erased an early deficit to lead at the half, then pulled away in the second half.

“I thought the first half was really good,” Keatts said. “We did a great job establishing ourselves, especially on the defensive end in the first half. In the second half, when we stopped making shots is when we stopped doing the little things. I thought they had all of the winning plays in the second half. When you look at us, it’s going to be hard for us to beat anybody in this conference, especially a good team like Duke, on their home floor, when you give up 16 offensive rebounds, and they got 25 points in transition. When we didn’t score, we didn’t get back, and we did a poor job of blocking out. … I thought the first time we played them, we out-rebounded them 51-43, and they completely out-rebounded us tonight. So we’ll move on, congratulate those guys. I thought they had a great bounce-back game and did a good job.”

Duke helped solve NC State’s success with ball screens leading to penetration by switching to a zone defense in the second half. “I thought the zone was effective, in a way,” Keatts said. “It made us play through our post guys, in the middle, because they extended out a little bit. The shot that they gave up was more of a middle shot, and I’m okay the way Jericole [Hellems] played there. I thought we beat them off a lot of ball screens in the first half because of the fact that Markell Johnson is very good off ball screens and can get to the hole. That being said, we had our opportunities. We had our great looks, and for whatever reason we just didn’t knock them down tonight.”