January 15, 2012
NC STATE BASKETBALL
J.P. GIGLIO (N&O)
Wolfpack bounces back in style, routs Deacons
N.C. State men’s basketball coach Mark Gottfried challenged his team to play better defense than it did during a midweek loss to Georgia Tech.
The Wolfpack responded by holding two of the ACC’s top scorers in check in a 76-40 blowout of Wake Forest on Saturday at Joel Coliseum.
Travis McKie, Wake Forest’s top scorer, finished with more turnovers (four) than points (two), and as many technical fouls as field goals (one). Guard C.J. Harris finished with 10 points, but he needed 12 shots to get there, and the Deacons went 2-of-20 from 3-point range.
“Our guys responded,” Gottfried said. “Where we have been weak has been containing really good scorers on the perimeter. Today, we did a much better job with that.”
With 20 points and six assists, Lorenzo Brown led N.C. State (13-5, 2-1) to its first ACC road win of the season and the Pack’s fourth straight win against the Deacs. The past three wins in the series each have been by at least 20 points. State hasn’t done that against an ACC opponent since it beat Clemson four straight from 1954 to 1955.
Luke DeCock (N&O)
N.C. State at Wake Forest observations
With C.J. Leslie held out of the starting lineup for what N.C. State coach Mark Gottfried called disciplinary reasons, DeShawn Painter got the start and responded with seven points and 12 rebounds in 28 minutes, tying his second-most minutes of the season.
“As a player, you get opportunities sometimes and DeShawn did very well,” Gottfried said. “I was very proud of him for that.”
LUKE DECOCK (N&O)
Deacons sink to new low
How far the Deacons have fallen from the days when the motorcycle and the tie-dye seemed like organic products of the atmosphere, not ridiculous contrivances to pump life (and exhaust fumes) into a lifeless building. It took Wake Forest 36 minutes to score as many points as N.C. State did in the first half.
The win-loss record may be better in Jeff Bzdelik’s second year, but Saturday’s performance was as bad as anything Wake Forest perpetrated upon its fans last season.
Motivated by the Georgia Tech experience, the Wolfpack came out with a distinct, physical edge. Wake Forest’s players wanted no part of it. N.C. State coach Mark Gottfried complimented his team for its defense on Wake Forest’s ball screens – if you call a player standing sort of vaguely in the way a screen.
“They hit and bumped us,” Bzdelik said. “Teams are going to do that. This is a league for men only.”
The problem may be more basic than that. Several times, with Wake Forest on offense, N.C. State’s assistant coaches leapt from the bench to call out where the ball was going long before it got there.
Brett Friedlander (starnewsonline.com)
Wolfpack answers the challenge in rout of Wake
Wake Forest basketball coach Jeff Bzdelik was so unhappy with his team Saturday that he forced the players to stay after the game to watch tape of their 76-40 loss to N.C. State.
Considering the results, perhaps he might have been better served by following the example of his Wolfpack counterpart Mark Gottfried.
Gottfried was just as unhappy with his own team after its clunker against Georgia Tech on Wednesday. But instead of dwelling on the lackluster performance and the loss it helped bring about, he immediately put it out of mind.
“He told us that we have a long way to go,†guard Lorenzo Brown said, “that we had to wash the Georgia Tech game off and just think about the next game.â€
Brett Friedlander (starnewsonline.com)
‘Disciplinary decision’ keeps Leslie out of State starting lineup
Between a three-game NCAA suspension to start the season, persistent leg cramps and a dramatic buzzer-beating game-winning basket against St. Bonaventure, it’s already been an eventful season both on and off the court for C.J. Leslie.
Saturday, the star forward added another chapter to the story when he was held out of the starting lineup for N.C. State’s game against Wake Forest.
It was a move that was made for disciplinary reasons. But that’s all coach Mark Gottfried was offering in the way of details after the Wolfpack’s 76-40 thumping of Wake Forest at Joel Coliseum.
Joedy McCreary (Associated Press)
N.C. State throttles Wake Forest, 76-40
Two career trips to Wake Forest, two blowout wins for N.C. State’s Lorenzo Brown. With record-threatening results like these, the Wolfpack feel right at home on the home floor of a top rival.
Brown scored 20 points and helped N.C. State embarrass the Demon Deacons on their court once again, routing them 76-40 on Saturday for its most lopsided ACC road victory in more than half a century.
“We’re just ready to play them every time,” said Brown, a sophomore. “We watched them play a lot this year, and we were kind of like iffy about whether it would be a good game or not.”
Bret Strelow (FayObserver.com)
N.C. State’s C.J. Williams answers Gottfried’s challenge
N.C. State coach Mark Gottfried issued a challenge to C.J. Williams at Thursday’s practice.
Given that Wake Forest star Travis McKie said he played the worst game of his college career Saturday, Williams clearly responded in the right manner.
Williams, who struggled to contain Maryland’s Terrell Stoglin and Georgia Tech’s Glen Rice Jr. in the Wolfpack’s first two ACC contests, limited McKie to two points in a 76-40 rout at Joel Coliseum.
Three days earlier, Rice scored 22 points in the Yellow Jackets’ upset of N.C. State, prompting Gottfried to address the need for improved defense from his senior leader.
“He told me I have to be a lockdown defender for this team,” Williams said. “We’ve got guys that can defend, but he wants to know that I can go and take the best player away.”
Stephen Schramm (FayObserver.com)
Wake Forest takes huge step back in ugly loss to N.C. State
After the final buzzer put a merciful ending on N.C. State’s 76-40 drubbing of host Wake Forest on Saturday afternoon, the Demon Deacons went through the handshake line and then stood near midcourt, arm-in-arm while the alma mater played.
Wake Forest coach Jeff Bzdelik stared at the court.
C.J. Harris gazed off into space.
Travis McKie had been in the locker room for nearly half an hour.
On a day that couldn’t have gone much worse for the Demon Deacons, the postgame ritual was borderline masochistic.
“Of course I’ll be there to support my school because I love Wake Forest to death, but it’s just that feeling in your stomach that you just don’t want to have,” Wake Forest center Ty Walker said.
Saturday’s game felt more like an unfair fight than a meeting of two of the league’s more resurgent teams. Playing the role of the confident bully, N.C. State gave the Demon Deacons the kind of thumping that leaves scars.
It was the worst loss of the Bzdelik era. It tied a 1998 loss to Duke as the worst Wake Forest loss in Joel Coliseum.
“I can’t explain the performance (today),” Harris said. “We just didn’t bring it.”
Dan Collins (Winston Salem Journal)
Wolfpack rip Deacons apart
The answer from the players was that the Wolfpack, on this day, were too determined, too physical and too well-schooled on the Deacons’ open-post motion offense. The Deacons scored on nine of 34 first-half possessions and trailed 33-17 by halftime. They followed that with points on just four of their first 20 possessions of the second half and were down 63-25 with 81/2 minutes remaining.
“They were all jamming us at the free-throw line when we were trying to pop out and keep moving the offense,” Fischer said. “A little bit, we let them jam us. They’re a strong team, but we didn’t cut hard.”
The coaches on the N.C. State bench were telling their players where the Deacons were headed before they got there. Harris, guarded most of the day by Williams, made three field goals on 12 attempts and scored 10 points — almost eight fewer than his average. McKie, coming off a 25-point performance at Maryland, made one of five field-goal attempts to score two points, 16 fewer than his average.
“I think our staff normally does a good job with their scouting,” coach Mark Gottfried of State said. “I don’t know, but it seemed to me today that we really had them pegged.”
Lenox Rawlings (Winston Salem Journal)
Deacons’ loss tough to watch
The Wake Forest folks among the 11,101 customers who came to see the show probably are scared of the consumer implications. They spent good money to watch a lot of bad basketball, and it’s just January. Refunds on advance tickets apparently aren’t available.
But that’s only half the equation. The Deacons (10-7, 1-2 ACC) hardly sit on the NCAA bubble. State does, and State (13-5, 2-1 ACC) desperately needed a win by any margin after that meltdown at home against Georgia Tech on Wednesday.
Coach Mark Gottfried and his assistants — especially Bobby Lutz, the former UNC Charlotte head coach — studied the flow of Wake Forest’s offense and erected roadblocks against the two real threats, C.J. Harris (10 points) and McKie (career-low 2 points). The most common tactic: bumping Harris whenever he made his cuts and sometimes hand-checking him in the chest when he had the ball.
An occasional fan demanded a foul, but the crowd remained morosely silent for long stretches after State built a 33-17 halftime lead. Bzdelik called the physical tactics routine. “This is a league for men only,” he said.
TheWolfpacker.com (video)
Wake Forest Locker Room Report
