This is why Saturday’s loss at home to Miami was so important.
North Carolina State point guard Lorenzo Brown will miss Thursday night’s game at Duke barring “a miracle,” a source told CBSSports.com Thursday afternoon.
Brown injured his ankle in last week’s loss at Virginia.
The 6-foot-5 junior did not play in Saturday’s loss at home to Miami.
Brown is averaging 12.7 points and 6.9 assists for Mark Gottfried’s Wolfpack. He had 12 points and 13 assists in NC State’s upset of Duke last month. That represented Duke’s first loss of the season.
Generally speaking, you want to be optimistic about how the Wolfpack played and how close the game was against the RPI’s #3 rated team in the country. Unfortunately, it still was a loss. Even though it was #ACCBullshit that Reggie Johnson got to camp in the lane for seven seconds and blatantly foul Richard Howell, at the end of the day it was a loss.
Tyler Lewis played AWESOME against Miami in Raleigh. The confidence and experience Lewis got on Saturday will help him the rest of the season and also serve to earn him more (deserved) playing time from a coach that seems to forget that he has more than six players on his roster in most games. But, I have a hard time imagining that a it will help him enough tonight to overcome the onslaught of pressure that we will receive in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
I fear that the physicality with which the ACC referees allow Duke to play defense is going to be too overwhelming for an inexperienced freshman point guard on the road in Cameron. It will only take a couple of bumps, reaches, pushes and body-ing up on traps that aren’t called that will result in State turnovers and easy fast break points for the Blue Devils to get them on enough of a roll to take advantage of their home court advantage tonight. Unfortunately, games like this are just made for Duke blowouts.
It sucks for us. It sucks for the 2013 season. It totally sucks. But, you still have to go out and play the game, and anything can happen. We’ll see tonight. But, hopefully we will see Lorenzo Brown back healthy for the Wolfpack with enough time to win some games and earn a respectable enough seed in the NCAA Tournament to help our efforts.
