Only one team at this weekend’s ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament will be seeded lower than the 11th-seeded Wolfpack, Miami, who heads to Greensboro after finishing the regular season with a record of 17-14 overall and 5-11 in conference play. But after wins in three of its last four games, coach Sidney Lowe and his players comments after Sunday’s season-ending win over Boston College reflected anything but apprehension.
“We’re very excited right now,” senior forward Dennis Horner said. “We have momentum going into the ACC Tournament. We have been playing well as a team. Everyone has been stepping up. People were getting open shots and we were knocking them down [against BC]. And that’s a big confidence booster going into the ACC Tournament.”
Since losing seven straight conference games, the last of which was a 67-58 loss to Maryland, State has reeled off wins over Wake Forest, Miami and Boston College to finish the conference season 3-1. The Pack’s strong finish in conference play, since its ACC record dropped to 2-10 after the loss to the Terps, has been a credit to its perseverance, Lowe said.
“I’m more proud of, and I have said this all year, how resilient this group has been, how they have bounced back from a loss and come right back in practice the next day and been ready to go,” Lowe said.
“If they didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have been able to make this run, to play the way we have in winning three out of four.”
Lowe said he likes the 11th-seeded Wolfpack’s chances if it plays the way it has over the last few weeks of the season.
“I told our guys, let’s just continue to play the way we are,” Lowe said. “That is the attitude we have to take. We have to be better than that team on just that night. That means just playing the way we have been playing, very unselfish and playing hard and playing together.”
The past two years, Lowe has struggled to duplicate the postseason success he enjoyed in his first ACC Tournament, when the 2007 team became the first in Wolfpack history to defeat three higher-seeded teams in a row. State has since lost its first round tilts in each of the past two seasons. But Lowe said he sees this year’s tournament field as wide open, and added fans should understand that in a tournament, anything can happen.
“Just the way the season has gone, that team that no one expects to win, they just need to have that one day where everything is clicking and guys are making shots,” Lowe said. “On the other hand, you might just get a team that has been at the top and they are just having a tough night and can’t make a shot. Anything can happen and that’s the great thing about the tournament. If you go in there in the right frame of mind and take them one game at a time, special things can happen. It is wide open.”
The Pack’s performance during the regular season against the ACC’s best supports Lowe’s assertion that this year’s tournament will be up for grabs. State defeated three of the top five seeded teams in the final standings: No. 1 Duke, No. 3 Florida State and No. 5 Wake Forest, beating both Duke and Wake by 14 points. And in four games against the conference’s top three teams in the final standings, Duke, Maryland and Florida State, the Pack went 2-2.
“We can win games,” junior forward Tracy Smith said. “We just have to play together and play hard and smart for forty minutes, not thirty.”
