After NC State’s 108-72 home win over Texas Southern on Wednesday night, Wolfpack coach Will Wade blasted his team postgame for a continued lack of intensity and toughness.
“It’s not going. S—, it’s concerning (that) it’s taken this long and we’re not there,” Wade said. “We’ve got all high-major games from here on out. Kindergarten’s over.”
NC State, now 8-4 on the season, has yet to beat a high-major opponent after losing in overtime to Kansas on Saturday.
“It’s tough. We’ve got a lot of nice guys,” Wade said. “Got great team GPA, got all that stuff, over a 3.0. It’s wonderful — if we were running a daycare. We’re running a competitive, Division I college basketball program.”
In the offseason, Wade made headlines for bringing in several of the nation’s most-wanted transfers, like guards Tre Holloman (Michigan State) and Terrance Arceneaux (Houston), plus All-Big 12 forward Darrion Williams (Texas Tech), who picked NC State over Kansas. Yet Williams did not play Wednesday due to a shoulder injury, and for the first time this season, Holloman did not start, scoring nine points in 18 minutes off the bench.
Arceneaux has only played 20 minutes or more in two of the team’s first 12 games.
“I had one of the kids come to me: ‘Oh, I’m tough, I’m tough.’ I said, s—, you’re not even in the top-50 of the toughest players I’ve coached,” Wade said. “You ain’t tough. You haven’t made the top 50. You wouldn’t make the top 25 of the last five years of who I’ve coached — and I sat out a year. I don’t wanna hear that.”
Instead, NC State was carried Wednesday by sophomore guard Paul McNeil, who broke out of a shooting slump to score a career-high 47 points, the most by an ACC player since Rodney Monroe in 1991 — 15 years before McNeil was born. McNeil’s 11 made 3-pointers set a new school record and tied the ACC record for 3-pointers in a single game.
However, outside of McNeil, who made 12 of the team’s 34 made baskets, only backup forward Jerry Deng scored in double figures.
“Casual. Lack of attention to detail. Lack of focus,” Wade said of his team. “That’s great when you have somebody who sets the ACC record for made 3s and the school record for made 3s, but we’re relying on hope that one of these cats is going to go ballistic every night. That’s what we rely on — just hope — and hope’s a bad strategy in my book.”
The only two players whom Wade called out by name as meeting his standards were starting center Ven-Allen Lubin, a North Carolina transfer who leads NC State in rebounding, and guard Quadir Copeland, who followed Wade from McNeese this offseason.
Copeland has been the team’s emotional leader so far, scoring a team-high 19 against Kansas. Importantly, Wade trusted him to take the team’s potential game-winning shot in regulation, before the Wolfpack lost in overtime.
“Quite frankly, I’ve been trying to get some urgency and some internal leadership, and I think Q’s (Copeland) done a pretty good job. Outside of Q and Ven (Lubin) — those guys are playing about as well as we can ask them to play — you take on the personality (of your players),” Wade said. “We’ve got a lot of casual personalities on our team. We don’t have people that are revved up and ready to go.”
Wade also crushed his team for a sloppy shootaround, in which he said his players made 88 mistakes, including 23 defensive errors and 13 offensive execution errors. He was especially frustrated that after the first team made 14 mistakes, the second team was even worse, making 22.
“How the hell,” Wade asked, “can you be on the second team and watch the first team do it, and make eight more mistakes?”
Dating back to his days as head coach of VCU and LSU, Wade has always been known for his blunt transparency with both the media and his players. He was infamously caught on a federal wiretap lamenting a “strong a— offer” he made for one recruit who ultimately went elsewhere, which contributed to his firing from LSU.
“I’m not everybody’s cup of tea,” Wade told The Athletic in November about his polarizing reputation.
NC State’s last remaining game of consequence in the nonconference is Sunday against reeling Ole Miss in Greensboro, N.C. While the Rebels have struggled themselves this season, and also don’t own a single high-major win, it’s the last marquee opportunity for Wade’s team to boost its nonconference resume.
And as Wade said Saturday, after the loss to Kansas, he’s aware his team is starting to run out of time to build its NCAA Tournament case.
“I’ve been concerned for weeks. We are who we are,” Wade said. “I said it a couple weeks ago, if you’re not physical and you’re not tough, you better be alert and aware — and we’re still none of the four.”