On Sunday, the NC State men’s basketball team will be taking a little trip down I-40 to Greensboro for a matchup with UNC-Greensboro at 3 p.m.
It’s the quintessential “trap game” for the Pack, and it will take a solid performance all around for NC State to leave the Greensboro Coliseum with a win. The Pack (7-2) is going up against a feisty Spartan (8-2) team, and there are quite a few factors impacting this matchup.
History of the Series
In total, the Wolfpack has only played the Spartans 11 times, going 10-1 in those games. The only time the Pack has lost to UNCG was back in 2017, in Kevin Keatts’ first year as head coach.
No doubt that that game will be in the back of Kevin Keatts’ mind when preparing for Sunday. In his weekly presser, Keatts had this to say about the 2017 game:
“I do care, but the players don’t,” Keatts said. “They don’t know anything about it. They don’t remember the game. I do. As you go back and watch the game, you remember more and more about the game. I didn’t realize that we were playing without Markell Johnson; he didn’t play in the game. To their credit, they came on the road and got a very good road win. It just shows what type of team they are. The tables have turned a little bit — instead of them coming to PNC and playing us, we’ve got to go to their place.”
While none of the players on this NC State team played in that game two years ago, Keatts will be using lessons learned from that game to make sure that history does not repeat itself.
The 2019 Spartans
UNCG head coach Wes Miller has built a strong program in his nine years leading the Spartans. The longest-tenured coach in the SoCon has ties to the state of North Carolina, as Miller was born in Greensboro and played at the collegiate level for UNC-Chapel Hill in the mid-2000s.
In the past few seasons, Miller’s program has tremendously improved. After an NCAA tournament appearance in 2018 and an NIT berth in 2019, the Spartans are looking to get back into the Dance, and a victory over the Pack would be a quality win to help build their case for an at-large berth, something they narrowly missed out on in 2019.
This year’s team has the talent to do just that, as a solid backcourt including guard Isaiah Miller has carried the scoring load for the team this year.
Isaiah Miller is coming off of 27- and 25-point games while shooting over 50 percent from the field. While his least efficient games have come against quality teams such as Georgetown and Kansas, UNCG was still able to win a close game against the Hoyas, meaning that this is a deep team that does not solely rely on Isaiah Miller to win games.
Jericole Hellems
A big story from the Wake Forest game was the injury to sophomore Jericole Hellems. After taking a nasty fall in the closing minutes of that game, Hellems was stretchered off and taken to a hospital in Winston-Salem.
Thankfully, Hellems did not suffer very serious injuries and is a game-time decision for Sunday. Keatts commented on Hellems’s status in a press conference on Friday.
“He had a low-grade, early in the week, concussion,” Keatts said. “From what everybody, the doctors and trainers, said, he’s passed the tests for a concussion. As far as his back goes, it was great news. There were no fractures. He had a couple, what I would say were compound fractures from an injury he had years ago. As far as this, we were blessed that he didn’t fracture anything in his back.”
Without being too optimistic, this is a very good sign that there is a chance the emerging star forward will play. Hellems will be missed if he is forced to sit out of the game, but at the same time, UNCG is also missing one of its best players in sophomore guard Kaleb Hunter. Both players were averaging double figures in scoring, which should definitely impact the offense of both the Spartans and the Wolfpack.
How the Pack matches up
The Hellems injury may impact the starting lineup, which will give more minutes to graduate students Pat Andree and Danny Dixon, but at the end of the day, the Pack will have to play the type of basketball it played in the second half of the Wisconsin game and in the first half of the Wake Forest game to win this game.
With the addition of redshirt freshman center Manny Bates, the only defensive liability left on the floor is with junior guard Braxton Beverly, but Beverly showed he is more than just an offensive 3-point threat in what was maybe the best total performance in his career against Wake Forest.
The Pack can match up well with just about any team in the country this year, and that is certainly the case with UNCG. The main key in this game will be not turning the ball over, something that the Spartans love to do.
NC State only has 105 turnovers this year, which ranks third-best in the ACC. However, the Spartans’ seventh-ranked defense nationally is sure to be a good test
A win on Sunday would help improve the Pack’s resume for the NCAA tournament, and it would also keep the momentum going for when the team travels to Auburn to face the Tigers.
