It's Not Time to Panic Over NC State Basketball

While NC State's 77-76 overtime loss to No. 19 Kansas may seem like yet another disappointment in the early days of the Will Wade era, the Wolfpack's situation isn't nearly as dire as many fans believe.

The Wolfpack has yet to suffer any totally unacceptable losses from a metrics standpoint, helping them stay afloat in the national polls and ranking systems like the NET, KenPom and Bart Torvik, all of which can help a team make the NCAA Tournament.

On this episode of the NC State Insider Podcast, host and lead beat writer Tucker Sennett breaks down why it's not time to press the panic button from both a basketball standpoint and a results standpoint.

Watch the new episode here

Will Wade agrees, but the time to make moves is now

The day before the Kansas loss, Wade claimed that the matchup was not a "must-win" or any form of end-all, be-all game for the Wolfpack. A loss to the Jayhawks couldn't hurt NC State and won't in the grand scheme of things, as Kansas is a program that will almost certainly be competitive in the Big 12 as its conference schedule gets underway in the coming weeks.

"It's like I told the guys. The results right now are lagging from our work; the results haven't shown on the scoreboard yet," Wade said after the loss. "But, we were massively better than we were 10 days ago when we left Auburn. The team is a lot better... Now, you can splinter when you're taking on water on these losses like this, but I don't believe this group will."

NC State stumbled out of the gate offensively, but it improved as the game became more of a back-and-forth affair down the stretch. The Wolfpack leaned on a much-improved defensive effort and star forward Darrion Williams found his rhythm in the final minutes of regulation and in the overtime period as well.

"We are getting better defensively. Offensively, we're playing a little bit better, but we got good shots," Wade said. "We missed a lot of threes tonight, but we are getting better. Now, we've got to stay together and keep making that progress, but we are making improvements and the scoreboard just hasn't been able to show that yet."

The opportunities to make noise in the non-conference schedule have come and gone. Now, the final two games of that portion of the calendar are about survival. Wade knows, but he's not ready to give up on his group.

"Time is running out. I'm not hitting the panic button... But there is an urgency about what we're doing," Wade said. "We've scheduled these games and we haven't won them, and we've also played the toughest non-conference schedule in our league by a pretty wide margin, but we haven't won the games. That is just a fact. But our team is good enough to win a lot of these games."

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