Time For Urgency Has Arrived For Wolfpack

With eight games remaining in the regular season, there's no margin for error left for coach Kevin Keatts' team

Geoff Burke/USAToday sports

A lead that was once 18 points earlier in the second half had been whittled down to just three with 5:43 remaining at Miami on Wednesday.

In the blink of an eye, both the game and NC State's NCAA tournament hopes appeared dangerously close to slipping away.

It was a moment of truth college basketball teams all across the country will be facing over the next three weeks as they work to stay -- or get -- on the right side of the postseason bubble.

And it won't be the last time the Wolfpack is faced with such a tipping point.

This time, coach Kevin Keatts' team rose to the occasion. 

State locked down defensively, holding Miami without a field goal for the rest of the game while following the lead of senior point guard Markell Johnson to outscore the Hurricanes 12-4 and pull away for a badly-needed 83-72 victory.

The win broke a three-game losing streak and improved the Wolfpack to 15-8 overall, 6-6 in the ACC. But more important, its performance down the stretch showed the kind of urgency that's needed to finish strong, earn a high ACC tournament seed and have a much better Selection Sunday experience than it did a year ago.

"I found out that with these guys, we've got a lot of basketball left in us," Keatts said after Wednesday's game. "These guys have got a lot of fight left in them. 

"I told them after the game, I said, 'Look, during every game I'm going to be on high intensity and I'm going to be after it. I was after it tonight. I was really active and that's how I want those guys to respond in the remaining amount of games we have left in the league."

As has been the case for virtually every ACC game this season, the Wolfpack was forced to play shorthanded in Miami.

It was announced just before tipoff that the Wolfpack would be without forward Jericole Hellems because of a shoulder injury suffered at practice two days earlier. He became the seventh of State's nine eligible scholarship players to miss a game because of injury or suspension.

Then, early in the second half, junior big man D.J. Funderburk was also sidelined with an undisclosed injury -- reducing the bench to just two healthy subs.

"We had some adversity and we fought through it," Keatts said. "That's what we were talking about with these guys. Throughout every game you're going to have adversity. How do you respond? 

"When they cut the lead to three, we found out a lot about our team. The league is as balanced as it's probably been in a while, so to get a road win is really good for us."

The Wolfpack will have two more chances to pick up road wins in its next two games -- at Syracuse and Boston College -- before returning home to face a finishing gauntlet that includes two games against Duke, another top-10 foe in Florida State and a trip to Chapel Hill for a rematch with North Carolina.

The games against Syracuse and BC are especially important, since both are among a logjam of teams with between five and seven league wins in the middle of the ACC standings.

With no game scheduled this weekend, State will have a few extra days to rest -- and in the case of Hellems and Funderburk, get healthy -- before getting back to the business of building momentum and a resume.

Whoever ends up being available, it will help the Wolfpack's cause to have all its best players playing well at the same time, as was the case in Miami on Wednesday when Johnson and C.J. Bryce both recorded double-doubles to lead a balanced attack that saw three other players contribute 10 or more points.

"We’re a good basketball team when we've got everyone playing together," Keatts said. "We’re a dangerous team when guys are playing that way."