Is Wake Forest trying to play themselves out of the NIT?

Here's Luke Tkach of the News & Observer. I took you away from Wake Forest, Syracuse. I apologize for that. Is Wake trying to play their way out of the NIT? Hey man, you know, it's Jim Boeheim and Greensboro.

What could go wrong? Another game, we've had a couple, which is typical of Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We've had a couple games that are not for the athletes. This is another one. We do have TV Teddy in this game.

Ted Valentine is putting on a show. I am sorry to miss that to come here and sit with you. I'm a little more excited about the games tonight than what we've got this morning. I feel like it's a morning session too.

I don't know why. There are some capable basketball teams here. Pitt is a good basketball team.

Georgia Tech is playing. They haven't beaten anybody good, but they've won seven of their last nine and the two losses were tight losses. They had a chance to win at NC State, so they're just playing a lot better.

I guess we see this at the end of the year anyway, where the bottom of the league starts. Either they're playing much better or everybody's just exhausted. Louisville led it half-time yesterday, which is practically a win for them. There might be some truth to that. Georgia Tech is playing well.

It's hard to tell. They literally have not played anyone good. They haven't beaten anybody good.

No, they haven't. Their best win is probably Florida Tech at this point, who is part of that seven and nine. True Josh Pastner pop philosophy, you're going to play a Division Two team in the middle of the ACC schedule.

Maybe a confidence booster, I don't know. When you look at today's games, the Syracuse Wake Forest doesn't really have any bearing on anything. Georgia Tech, Pitt. I think Pitt's in, even if they lose to Georgia Tech.

I agree. I may be wrong, but that game doesn't feel like it has much bearing on anything other than who Duke plays. We get to the evening, these games really start to matter. Oh, there's no question. I look at North Carolina as a can't lose.

Yes. I think NC State is a don't lose from the standpoint that State just has to get back to playing well. They haven't really played well. Coming off the win over North Carolina, the next game was Wake Forest, I believe. And their defense did not show up for that game. And from that point on, their defense just hasn't been there. And again, that may be a completely different game if Damari Monsanto doesn't get hurt. Right.

So there's a little bit of bullet dodging going on there, too. NC State just needs to get its mojo back a little bit. I think that's why it's actually good that they had the bye Saturday, the off day Saturday after the Duke game. I think that's a good time for them to take a break and recompress. I think, from everything I can tell, NC State should still be in, even if they lose tonight.

But that's going to make for a very nervous five days because you just don't have any guarantees. A win over Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech, despite being the 11 seed, that's still a win over a winning team. A team that was ranked at one point. That's probably, you know.

Top 70 team right now. That helps you a hair. Obviously not quad one, but it helps you a hair. Oh, I see. I was hoping to have a conversation without mentioning the word quad.

You know, I would love to. I wish we didn't have to. I've had this conversation with several members of the basketball committee over the years about how we don't need them. And we have perfectly good ways of measuring a team's resume that don't involve arbitrary groupings. But that, you know, I get it. That's the way the human brain works. It's really hard to look at 30 games and assess them rationally. Our brains just aren't built for that.

You break it into four bins. Our brains can assess that. But it's a terrible way to do it.

And we just need to use strength of record or wins above bubble or whatever result resume metric you want to use. And most of them are pretty good. Not all of them. And then you get a you get a total objective appraisal of what everybody's done.

We know we have the right. Yeah. I mean, Bart Torvick has a good as a good way to win a bubble win above bubble ESPN strength of record, I think is good, too. You know, the other one, you know, there's there's a couple of people on the on the Web who sort of calculate the wins above bubble.

Using Ken Palm, using Evan Mia and things like that. But in the end, this isn't an unknown. It's it's not even a known unknown.

It's a known. We know exactly how good we know exactly how well you played. Winning the games you won and losing the games you lost.

We know the exact quality of each of those wins and losses. We just have to look at it like Charleston is a great example. I think Charleston before last night and they won.

They took the drama out of things. I think they're 50 first. I think they're in the 30s in the in the net. No, not the net.

OK, we can. But except they use the net to group their team. My point is, right. Charleston was like 38th and wins above bubble. That's better than half the teams that are locks in the field.

And so if you look at that instead of their net, instead of quadrants, you say, hey, if a team, let's see, let's see who in the A.C.C. is 30 in that rough comparison of wins. Hey, Duke, Duke is 25th. Charleston basically played has the same quality of wins playing its schedule, which isn't as good. Right. That Duke does at twenty three and eight. We know that we can look at.

Here's how good this team will anyway. We don't need to get down this rabbit hole. My point is, we have better ways of doing this that don't involve quadrants that you don't need. And if we did that, we'd have a more equitable field. But the reason they don't want to do that. One, the quadrants are simple and easy to understand.

And two. They allow the committee to cook the books however it wants to cook the books. Sure. In that particular same thing as nonconference strength of schedule. That is a completely meaning.

It's already baked into everything. You're double counting something completely meaningless. Your nonconference strength of schedule has no bearing on anything. It's just a strictly a measure of how good the teams you played were. But it's just as hard to beat a bad team by 20 as it is to beat a good team by one, mathematically speaking. That sounds crazy, but it's true. It's hard to beat bad teams by a lot.

So we have we have ways of measuring all these things. Anyway, the upshot of this is whether NC State should or shouldn't be in with with a loss to Virginia Tech tonight. I still think they are. I think.

You want to for your sanity and for everything, as you said, for playing well. Yeah. You need to beat Virginia Tech. I think they do.

I'm almost. Improving their seating almost doesn't matter, because what is it like? So if they're on the 10 line now, would you rather be on the 10 line or would you rather be on the eight eight line? Yeah, I'd rather play a two seat if I win.

I mean, that's like I might. Of course, he has argued before a lot that they shouldn't put like the better teams should probably be the 10 or the 11. Right. I mean, there's not that big a difference when you get to that part of the bracket in terms of like the difference in quality of a team between a seven seed and an 11 seed. There's just not that big a difference between those teams. It's another arbitrary grouping.

It is absolutely arbitrary grouping. Right. Luke, the cock of the news and observer is our Carolina's problems more mechanical or metaphysical?

I think they're both and I think they're the same thing. And I think we've seen it for three years that for whatever reason, whether it's personalities or too many guys who need the ball or not quite fitting the system, I just feel like this is a collection of parts that have never, with the exception of two and a half weeks, meshed together and been a whole. They've all this Carolina team in Roy's last year for 90 percent of Hubert's first year for most of this year has been less than the sum of its parts.

It has never played up to its talent level, with the exception of maybe the first 15 minutes of the Baylor game, the first 25 minutes of the Baylor game, certain periods of time, the Duke games, obviously. But I just feel like, you know, it's a group that just has never had, for whatever reason, has never fit together extremely well. And I think that's honestly I think that's more basketball than personalities. And I think it's why when Dawson Garcia left last year, that was the springboard for that team's success, not because he was a bad guy, but because it allowed players to shift into roles that fit them better.

Manic especially, but others too. And when you put all that together, they haven't been able to kind of cross that Rubicon this year. They haven't been able to get over that hump where everybody kind of, you know, defaults into positions where they play well together. It just feels like they've kind of been, when I say fighting each other, I don't mean like fighting in the dressing room. I mean like fighting each other, like just, you know, struggling to see who's supposed to have the ball win and who's going to take this shot. And, you know, part of the problem is you have three very ball dominant players. You have one player who's extremely good defensively, but, you know, erratic defensively or offensively. And, you know, and then you have Pete Dance who comes in new and not, you know. He's filling a much bigger role than anybody thought.

Probably. So, I'm just saying, you say that if I said what I just said about any team and it's not the number one preseason team in the country and they didn't ruin K's farewell and they didn't come within a couple shots of winning the national title, you know, we would say, oh yeah, you know, that reminds me of whatever. I mean, there have been, you could say that about some Duke teams in the past. I mean, honestly, that you could say that at times about Zion's Duke team, that one of the problems that they had in reaching their potential and one of the reasons they were so good when the best player in the country was out is because they had too many guys who needed the ball in their hands. Now, they did figure that out right up until the end of the Michigan State game. But even the UCF win was narrow. I mean, that team was never that comfortable other than the ACC tournament.

No, that was Taco Fall. That was a very good Duke. And there were some other things at work with Johnny Dawkins coaching Central Florida. Luke, before I let you go, canes were bad. And then, of course, they weren't. And they dominated the third period, scored twice, had one chalked off. But they got the second one, got into overtime, dominated that, didn't score. We've seen that before. And then your guy, Jesperi Koc in the Emmy, in the shootout.

Yeah, you know, this is, it's so funny. I watch what the Hurricanes do now. It's what good teams do, right? Bad night, win in the shootout, two points. For 10 years, we watched the Hurricanes on the other side of that coin. Every time. Played well, coughed it up in the third, losing a shootout, losing overtime, you know, lose on a last minute goal. And it's just funny, like, oh, this is how the other half lives. This is how it is for the good teams.

Right. And I don't know that the Hurricanes, even if you go back to the 0-2, 0-6, 0-9 triumvirate and the frustrating years that were in between that, like 0-3, 0-4, 0-2, 0-3, 0-6, 0-7, 0-7, 0-8, 10-11. I don't remember them ever having that level of consistent dominance that this team has now and has really had since about the COVID shutdown. Basically, coming back, going into that and coming back from that, they just do things that good teams do. The stadium series was a great example of that. A lot of distractions, family, people in from Finland, sleeping on your couch, drinking beers in your living room, as Aunty Rhonda said.

All that stuff going on. You're the home team, so you have more responsibilities, a lot of hype building up to it, the Hall of Fame thing on Thursday. And they went out and they just absolutely put their foot on the throat of the Capitals. That's what good teams do. And it baffles me why they've been unable to replicate that in the playoffs. I don't know when they lost to Tampa, they had this in them. I do know they had it in them last year because we saw them do it against the Bruins in their regular season. And the only thing that I can say is, if I were a Hurricanes fan, I would be more optimistic this year.

Because one, they've won a lot of games when they either weren't the better team or weren't getting rewarded for being the better team, which has not been true of this group in the past. And two, honestly, I think Ghostosphere is what we've talked about. How long did we talk about that?

Months. They need a third pairing defenseman who can help on the power play. Left shot third pairing defenseman who can help on the power play. And he's that. He's a rental.

Which means he was never on my list because I figured they'd want some guy with five years of term. But, you know, that I think is going to be a huge, for the first time, probably in a long time, I'd have to go back and look at rosters and power play groupings. They're not going to have to rely on one unit. They have a treasure man for a second unit who knows what he's doing. They spread it out too. And you can spread out your talent then.

They did. And then, you know, then you can balance your shots a little better and you're not just kind of, you know, they still have that tendency. And I think a lot of teams do to overpass and when they feel under pressure or feel stressed, you know, that becomes that sort of we got to whip it around the perimeter 19 times before we shoot. But I do think having that second unit one is going to put more stress on opposing penalty killers. I think that's a big part of what we've seen so far is just that teams that got used to defending the Hurricanes power play a certain way suddenly have to adjust. You can't just run your top guys against Brent Burns and try to deny the shot from the point. All right, one more thing. We got better.

We have like a minute left for Luke to cock. Goal tending an issue. Pros know a thing or two about how to get the toughest messes clean. That's why they've long trusted cleaning products from Ecolab for their businesses. And now that level of clean is available for your home at the Home Depot. Introducing Ecolab Scientific Clean, a full line of pro grade cleaning products for all your home's needs so you can clean like you mean business. Now available exclusively at the Home Depot.

How doers get more done. You know, that's my only fear at this point. I guess what I would say is whether it is or not, the bed has been made right.

You're going to sleep in it. And I'd rather run with these two guys and see what happens. Hold on a second. You interrupted me.

Now you've wasted so much of my last minute. I'd rather run with these two guys than roll the dice with Kachikov. Although I will say his weekend in Chicago makes me want to reconsider that.

Because when you score a goal, celebrate like that, almost get in one fight, get in another fight, get thrown out of two games. I mean, you know, that's the guy I knew in the first round last year. But I don't want to depend on that. I understand. Yeah. Was that the first day I could get with the second day? Not a good look.

Luke, the cock. I appreciate your time. Pros know a thing or two about how to get the toughest messes clean. That's why they've long trusted cleaning products from Ecolab for their businesses. And now that level of clean is available for your home at the Home Depot. Introducing Ecolab Scientific Clean, a full line of pro grade cleaning products for all your home's needs. So you can clean like you mean business. Now available exclusively at the Home Depot. How doers get more done.