What Bothered Wade From NC State's Thrilling Win Against SMU?
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RALEIGH — Standards are something that dominate Will Wade's coaching style at NC State. Whether it's a set of them for an individual game that the team must meet, or the high expectations he set for the program before the season, the standards are always swirling around the program in one way or another. Sometimes, even wins aren't up to par in Wade's eyes.
Wade's point guard, Quadir Copeland, authored one of the great distributing performances in program history during Tuesday's 84-83 win, dishing out 16 assists without a turnover. However, the final score bugged the realistic coach, who believes that if his team played to its best ability, things wouldn't have been nearly as close.
Wade's reasoning for frustration
As he's done frequently since the start of the ACC slate, Wade aired his grievances with his team's performance on the "Wolfpack Weekly" radio show Thursday. While he is pleased with the upward trajectory, he and his staff worked hard to prevent the team from getting ahead of itself with strong competition remaining in the rest of the regular season. Winning by one despite Copeland's masterful performance sparked Wade's discussion of the standards.
"When he plays that well, or he plays like that, we should not win by one," Wade said. "We should be better... What if Copeland doesn't bank in the three? Nobody talks about that... We lose by two. At the end of the first half, at the media timeout, we gave up five points at the end of the first half. That's five points. We were 12-of-20 at the free-throw line. Gave up eight points there."
The laundry list of hypotheticals Wade provided was all issues the coach likely addressed with the team after it returned from Dallas confident and victorious. His stress of avoiding high-turnover games and winning the turnover margin clearly became a point of frustration, as Copeland's efforts should have led to a larger win in his eyes.
"We lost 25 points in that game that we control, but we were terrible," Wade said. "So if Copeland has 16 assists and no turnovers and we make 16 threes, we should win by a helluva lot more than one point. We've got to get our guys... To understand there's a standard you have to play to and that's not getting it done."
Through the first half of the conference schedule, NC State faced mostly bottom-tier ACC competition. However, the Wolfpack stole road wins over Quadrant 1 foes at Clemson and SMU, but both were narrow margins of victory. The games could've swung either way from Wade's point of view, something he wants to avoid moving forward.
"If we keep walking a high-wire and we keep doing stuff like that... We're going to get beat. We're going to get beat Saturday by Virginia Tech if that happens," he said. "All this Pollyanna and everybody throwing their shoulders out and patting each other on the back, it's not reality. And I live in reality."
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Tucker Sennett graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Sports Journalism from the esteemed Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. A former basketball player, he has gained valuable experience working at Cronkite News and brings a deep passion for sports and reporting to his role as the NC State Wolfpack Beat Writer On SI.
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