Last season was one to forget for the NC State men’s basketball team.

A school-record 21 losses, a last-place finish in the ACC, multiple key injuries and a first-round exit in the ACC Tournament left a lot of uncertainty as to the direction of the program heading into the offseason.

To be fair, the team had some bad luck. Star forward Manny Bates, who was expected to be the team’s best player, suffered a season-ending shoulder injury less than two minutes into the first game of the season. Then-freshman forward Ernest Ross also suffered a season-ending injury midway through the year, and then-junior forward Greg Gantt, who was expected to play a significant role after transferring from Providence, never played a single minute.

That left a depleted frontcourt and a backcourt made up of almost entirely freshmen and sophomores. There was never a shortage of effort as the Pack scratched and clawed in every game, but the team struggled to execute and win. That left one man at the center of all NC State fans’ frustrations — head coach Kevin Keatts, who was on the hot seat all season.

“It was a challenge,” Keatts said. “When you lose one of your kids or one of your players, it’s one of the toughest things. You think about your program, you think about that young man and you think about the family, how much time he spent trying to get better. … When you play in a power league like the ACC, you can’t play a lot of guys that don’t have experience. It was a very humbling experience for me.”

In his five seasons as NC State’s head coach, Keatts has made the NCAA Tournament just once, his first year in Raleigh, and many fans wanted him gone after last season. But Athletic Director Boo Corrigan made the decision to bring Keatts back for another year, which was the right call.

Keatts performed one of the best coaching jobs in school history in his first year when he led a ragtag group of transfers and players left over from the tenure of previous head coach Mark Gottfried to the NCAA Tournament as a 9-seed,in a season that included wins over both Duke and UNC. The Pack should have made the tournament in his second season and probably would have in 2020 had the year not been cut short due to COVID-19.

The other season NC State didn’t make the tournament was in 2020-21, which was played amidst the pandemic and was one in which the Pack lost star player Devon Daniels midway through the season to injury. Before Daniels’ injury, NC State beat UNC, and even afterwards, the Pack won five games in a row to end the season and won a game in the NIT.

The point is that Keatts has had some bad luck in his time in Raleigh, but nonetheless, he has proven himself to be a good coach who gets the most out of his players. However, this season could be Keatts’ most important yet, and if he is to stay beyond this year, he’ll have to prove once again that he is a good coach and help the Pack perform much better than it did a season ago.

Like his first season, Keatts has had to start from scratch this year as multiple key players have left: Bates transferred to Butler, leading scorer Dereon Seabron went to the NBA, Jericole Hellems and Thomas Allen graduated and youngsters Cam Hayes and Jaylon Gibson transferred.

But Keatts still has one star from last year’s team: sophomore guard Terquavion Smith, who established himself as one of the best freshmen in the ACC last season and will look to be one of the best players in the league this year.

“I didn’t expect to have that much success early, but I kind of knew it was coming,” Smith said. “I know I’m a dog; I wasn’t gonna back down from anything. … There’s a lot of things we’re trying to do. ACC Tournament — we want to win that. We want to go to the [NCAA] Tournament. We just want to show people that we understand the tradition NC State has, the legacy that we’re holding, and that we’re trying to keep it going.”

In the backcourt, the team returns Ross, Gantt and junior forward Ebenezer Dowuona, and in the frontcourt, the team returns former Virginia transfer and senior guard Casey Morsell, as well as sophomore guard Breon Pass.

Even with those players returning, there were plenty of holes still left to fill, so Keatts had to hit the transfer portal. Perhaps the biggest need was more experience in the frontcourt, which the Pack got with graduate forwards DJ Burns, a Winthrop transfer who won Big South Player of the Year in 2021-22, and Dusan Mahorcic, a native of Serbia who has played four seasons of college basketball at four different schools, most recently transferring from Utah.

“I just wanted a different energy,” Keatts said. “I wanted some older guys to be able to play with guys like Terquavion, Breon Pass and Ernest Ross. I like the direction that our program is going — I feel good about it. We want to get back to playing the way we played my first three years. I like our team — we’ve got depth, we can get back to pressing, back to running.”

Keatts also needed more experience in the backcourt, which he got with graduate guards Jack Clark, a transfer from La Salle, and Jarkel Joiner, a transfer from Ole Miss. In getting Joiner, the Pack not only adds a quality scorer and shooter, but also a vocal leader. That’s something that doesn’t show up on the stat sheet but still makes a difference on the court and in the locker room.

“I love to talk, I love to communicate,” Joiner said. “This team is amazing to be around. I’m very vocal; I like talking to my teammates, being communicative and learning from my teammates from day one was the goal.”

Sometimes, just when you’re least expecting it, NC State will surprise you. In Keatts’ first season, the Pack was picked to finish 12th in the Preseason ACC Media Poll, then ended up beating three top-10 teams, finished in a tie for third place in the league and earned its first NCAA Tournament berth in three years.

This season, NC State is picked to finish 10th in the ACC, which is as tough as it has ever been with three teams in the preseason top-25 and two in the top-10, including preseason No. 1 North Carolina. It’s pretty much a do-or-die season for Keatts, but he’s proven he can pull off the unthinkable once before, and he can do it again.