NC State basketball fizzled at the end of the season

As what I'm going to call it, Martine Madness. There you go.

As we go to the metro region. I'm just filling out my bracket. Oh, again? Well, no, I'm not doing it.

Although, we have Jay Williams on every Tuesday. Okay. I asked him for his Final Four last week. He said, can I wait until next week? No. That's what I said. No?

What? That makes it a lot easier. All I got to pick out is 16 as opposed to 68?

Yeah, things are a little easier. So, I have one team left. In my Final Four.

I have two. I still have Houston and Alabama. My national championship game is completely gone. I had Kansas beating Duke. That's cooked. I had Arizona beating Kansas. I got one win combined out of those two.

Exactly. I had Arizona, Duke, Kansas, and Miami in the Final Four. I still have Miami still alive until they see Houston. If Marcus Sasser is healthy, Houston is going to the Final Four.

I don't know if they get to the national championship game, but they're going to the Final Four. If Marcus Sasser is healthy. It's kind of amazing to me that on, was it Thursday? On Thursday, he left the game injured. Same injury. Re-aggravated the groin injury. Yesterday or Saturday, whatever day they played, he looked fine.

Was he shot up? Which is possible, I guess. Houston looks awfully, awfully good. You probably don't pay attention to this because you're busy with professional lacrosse Twitter. Free agency did begin a couple weeks ago. Really?

Yeah, it did. Any big signings? Yeah, Mack O'Keefe going to the Archers.

Did he? Big time move. You have an Archers sweatshirt. I know. I'm an Archers fan.

Alright, who isn't? I kind of like that name, by the way, the Archers. It is. Great name. Accuracy, the whole thing.

Pinpoint accuracy. So, I don't even know what I was talking about. Never mind. You said I was busy with lacrosse Twitter. So, people are still litigating the Virginia Tony Bennett thing on Twitter. Of course. Can we stop?

Can we just stop with that? It ain't about Tony Bennett. It's never been about Tony Bennett. It's about players. It is 100% about athletes. You can overcome whatever you, however you play, if your players are good.

Really good. You got dudes. You can overcome it. Because pace doesn't stop teams from winning. It just doesn't. You just overcome it with athletes. Does it narrow your margin for error?

Yeah, it does. Fewer possessions creates lower scores, creates a smaller gap between winner and loser, creates the chances that the winner will have a problem. The team who is theoretically better will have a problem.

That's just common math's math. But, if you've got dudes, you'll be okay. So, nobody playing slower than Houston. But look at them. They got dudes. Marcus Sasser's gonna be in the NBA.

He's not the only one. That's about that. That's all it is. Alright. Ton of things I want to talk about today. Brian Geissinger's gonna tell us why Duke and State went home and why Miami might be staying around.

Hopefully a little bit longer. I have my Final Four. I'd like to get one out of the Final Four today.

Or this, whatever we're talking about here. So, we got that. Also, I think, and we'll talk about this in Out of the Gate, a pretty good start to free agency for the Carolina Panthers. I agree. I think a solid effort off of last year's solid free agency effort. And I don't know how to react to that.

And the Hurricanes did March Madness type things. So, we have a lot of things to do. So, let's start, Dennis. And I didn't even point out that it's Dennis Cox, not Victoria today. Oh, you couldn't tell by the different voice? I could tell.

I'm sure others could tell. But I did not introduce you. And that is an error on my part. I don't need no introduction. Error! Error! E-me!

Dennis Cox. Good to have you along for the ride. Are you ready for Place Your Bets? Absolutely. Of course we are.

We're always ready for Place Your Bets. Alright. Let's get to it. Let me bring up the correct page.

And we will go from there. There is a song in one of my favorite albums by a group called Buckshot Le Funk. Excuse me? Exactly. It's actually Branford Marsalis.

Okay. One of the great jazz musicians of our time. Has kind of a jazzy pop outfit called Buckshot Le Funk. I think it was Men in Black. They might have done the music for Men in Black 3 or Men in Black 1.

One of those. Anyway, they've got a song on one of their albums called And We Out. And that's kind of how I feel about the Triangle and the NCAA Tournament. And We Out. State got cretined on Friday afternoon. State had a 7 point lead early in the second half. And then foul trouble built. And Creighton got going. And that was that. And Creighton is simply a better team than NC State.

All of that. Here's Kevin Keats on the loss. You know I thought our guys fought the entire game. We wanted to. Obviously they got a pretty good lead on us. And we wanted to cut the lead and put a little bit of game pressure on them. And I think we did. Give Creighton a lot of credit.

Very good basketball team. And every time we made a run I thought they made a run. And obviously they made some plays down the stretch.

That's true. As for Keats on the season as a whole. I am super proud of my team. I mean this is when you look at where we were at last year to where we're at now. And how hard our guys worked. And what a season we had with 23 wins and guys playing their butts off. Guys like Jaquell Joyner and the other transfers and the guys like Tequavion Smith who decided to come back means a lot to us. Our program.

I thought those guys completely fought the entire year. We did some really good stuff. We're going to walk out here with our head up.

Continue to build and keep pushing this program in the right direction. Somebody needed a tissue. It appears. Pollen Strong man.

Somebody needed a Kleenex. He mentioned Tequavion Smith who came back for another year. I don't anticipate it's going to be junior season for Tequavion Smith.

But either way he reflects on his time at State. I'm just blessed and glad that I got to play with the group of guys I got to play with. I'm glad I got the coach that I have and I got the staff that I have. I'm glad I chose NC State. Like he said every time I talked to coach and when he was recruiting me all the way till now everything he told me that would happen happened.

I just had to believe in it and put the work in for it. I'm just glad to have these group of guys and the coaching staff that I have. Part of me is disappointed because I really thought NC State was better than the end of the season showed. They were better than. After they won at home against North Carolina it looked to me like they were ready to click into gear. But a very poor defensive effort at Wake Forest or at home against Wake Forest even in a win became the loss at home to Clemson and another loss to Clemson in the ACC tournament. Clemson who didn't even make the NCAA's and I have no idea how well they're doing in the NIT to be perfectly honest. But the end of the season I don't believe was reflective of just how good they could have been so it's a disappointment in that they really didn't do much in March.

It really was disappointing disappointed in that. Turquavian Smith though had balled out in what might have been his final game at NC State more than likely. 32 points for the game. Shot a relatively efficient percentage from the field. He only made like one of five threes whatever but that's fine. He was efficient in other ways and kept them in it.

Gave them a chance. Jarkel Joiner didn't play well. He just didn't play well.

He didn't play terribly but he didn't control or impact the game like he has in recent weeks. 13 points. 0 of 5 shooting from 3. 5 of 18 overall.

He has been largely an efficient operator for them throughout the last month and a half, two months of the season. Wasn't there against Creighton. And DJ Burns got in foul trouble. So did Abby DeJuana but DJ Burns more important to stay on the court and he played 18 minutes. The other numbers don't matter if DJ Burns only played 18 minutes. They weren't winning a game if DJ Burns could only be on the court as an offensive threat for 18 minutes. I didn't like some of the calls on DJ Burns but you know we never like the calls. They make bad calls all the time.

But I didn't like some of them. Did that change the game? Probably. Did they lose because of it? No. Creighton's better. Creighton's the better team.

End of discussion. Ryan Kalkbrenner had 31 points on 11 of 14 shooting. He only missed threes I believe. I think he missed three three attempts and he missed nothing else. He might have missed one two point field goal.

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Progressive cash flow insurance coverage provided in service by affiliates and third party insurers. Alright to the blue devil. Was that football? Was that football? Was that roller derby?

Was it, I don't know what that was. Sort of basketball. It was a fist fight between Duke and Tennessee. And I think Tennessee was going to do that and Duke will play that game. Duke has no problem being physical.

That's fine. To me maybe the style of play is maybe what bothered Duke and took them out of their offense but that ain't why they lost. They could have won that game.

They had to. They were leading was it 21, like 15 or so. No, 21, 13. I think right before the half. Not right before probably five minutes before the half. And Tennessee led 27-21 at the break. It was a 14-0 run to end the half. Something strange like that. Maybe it wasn't that long but Tennessee had grown men.

Grown men. Including, was this the World Cup? They got beat by Uruguay, Serbia, and Finland. Actually the kid from Serbia had no points. But the kid from Finland had 27. Put them on a line with Ajo.

Exactly. It's just unbelievable. Anyway, they got roughed up by Tennessee and Duke did roughing up too and both teams flopped all over the place. John Shire on the team. I'm hurting for these guys. They've given us everything you could ask for. They've fought through adversity. They've stuck together when things weren't looking as good and came into this game one of the hottest teams in the country and we felt like we were supposed to win this game. And it really felt like a Sweet 16 Elite 8 game type of game.

They're really good and credit them. They shoot almost 50 from 3. Kamala has one of his best games. Maybe his best game ever and you've got to tip your hat to him. Tennessee was 9-20 from 3. Duke shot under 30%.

Said all along, Duke doesn't have to shoot a high percentage but somewhere in the mid 30s is fine. And ultimately Duke being unable to get shots to fall from the perimeter hurt. Tyrese Proctor played a good game. Duke had their own foul trouble to deal with. Jeremy Roach picked up 3 fouls in the first half and wasn't the same player in the second half.

And he picked up his fourth early in the second half and I think he fouled out with like 6 minutes to go. Yeah, no Mitchell either. And Mitchell doesn't even play. He takes Mitchell out of the lineup entirely.

So before the game, knee injury. And that's a big impact on Duke's defense as much as anything. Plus another guy on the court who doesn't need plays run for him. Basically all you're doing offensively is trying to set Filipowski or Roach and Proctor's not running. You're not running plays for Proctor either. So when Duke's out there with their starting 5, Lively, Mitchell and the other 3, you're really only trying, if you're going to run sets you're going to run them for Filipowski or you're going to run them for Roach.

And everybody else just gets offense off that. But you're missing another guy. You're missing a key piece defensively. There you go. Jeremy Roach, again foul trouble just 13 points. I don't know if it's his final game or not.

We're going to have to talk about that down the road. Here's Jeremy Roach on the adversity this season presented. We're not going to talk about last season or whatever. Obviously we wanted to make it as far as we could but it happens. It's March.

It's a one game season. I'm just proud of these guys for fighting through everything that we've been through. Injuries, losses, tough losses and we just kept battling adversity and staying on the court so I'm just proud of these people. Good year.

I don't know. Is it a great year? They won the ACC championship.

They're going to put up a banner for that. It's hard to be upset especially when we saw this Duke team in November and December and even in January it'd be kind of hard to expect anything that we ended up getting. They could have missed the NCAA tournament based on what we saw. They were 18-1 this year when they had their full roster. 18-1 this season. They didn't have it this past game. Mitchell's an important piece.

He's a starter. But ultimately the fact that they really struggled to score caught up with them. It's not like they got Tennessee put up 80.

No. Ultimately it was their struggles offensively that got them and men. Tennessee grown men. I think we're seeing that throughout college basketball. The older teams are doing better. So the ACC is down only to Miami. And think about we saw Princeton beat Arizona on day one. We saw Purdue lose to Fairleigh Dickinson who didn't even win their league. Mary Mack won the Northeast Conference but was ineligible for the NCAA tournament. Which says to me they shouldn't have been playing in their conference tournament.

But that's fine. So we lost a two on day one. A one on day two. Another one on day three when Kansas lost to Arkansas. Right? The high seeds dropping like flies. Jay Billis on whether or not upsets are good for college basketball.

That's sort of a matter of taste. I mean this is a tournament. And you have 68 teams. You don't have the 68 best teams because you have automatic qualifiers for some of these smaller conferences. So it's incredibly inclusive. And it's incredibly fair. Everybody has a chance to get in as an automatic qualifier against their peers by winning their conference tournament. So the truth is everybody's in.

And then once you get there you have to win. So it's sort of the Tiger Woods theory. Is it better for golf if Tiger Woods is playing his best or would you rather see other players do well? I don't know the right answer there. Those are matters of taste.

Yes we do know the right answer to that. Golf is better when Tiger Woods is dominating. But that's fine. There's two schools of thought here with that. And it's not a matter of taste.

It's a matter of data. And the truth is that the tournaments generally do better in terms of attention when the big boys stay around. What we like is Cinderella to show up on Thursday and Friday and then go away on Saturday and Sunday. Princeton decided to stick around. Last year St. Peters decided to stick around. And there is something warm and fuzzy about that. But when we get to for instance we get to the Elite 8 last year and it's Carolina St. Peters.

Right? That's cute and all but it's better for the event when it's Carolina pick a team. Michigan State it's just better for the event. But that's fine. We like Cinderella Now when we get to this round we would like Cinderella to have already turned back into a pumpkin. Did Cinderella turn into a pumpkin or the coach turned into a pumpkin? Cinderella stayed who she was. Yeah she did. She just said she had to put on her peasant clothes again.

Yeah that's all it was. I like the combination of when you get the teams that do make a run to the Sweet 16. The upsets going against some of the traditional powers. I think it's nice when you have that blend. I like that in round 2. Yeah but even the Sweet 16 like Princeton getting into the Sweet 16 that's fine but you still have other great teams like Michigan State in there.

A name and brand that you recognize. So it's nice when you have that combination of it together going forward. So we're down 2-1's and 2-2's already. Marquette and Purdue out of the east the 1 and the 2 are gone. Purdue and Marquette are gone. And in the south the 2, Arizona's gone. And in the west the 1, Kansas is gone.

So we have 2-1's and 2-2's remaining. That's good. By the way the ACC is only down in Miami. The Big East sorry the Big 10 is down only to Michigan State.

Nobody's surprised at that. Alright we'll get to more of that in a minute. I want to get to some other things.

Panthers are, they keep doing smart things. I don't know what to do with my hands, Dennis Cox. I don't know either. I ain't going to tell you.

Just wave them like this. Sure. Adam Thielen. Kind of like it. Kind of like the signing.

We sort of joked about it on Friday of last week. Why not go after Adam Thielen? He can still play. Big target.

Probably not an ideal one but okay. Adam Thielen. Miles Sanders.

We talked about this last week. I love that signing. They're talking about a running back. Good player obviously as a runner but also can catch the ball out of the backfield. I like Miles Sanders. Hayden Hurst. Love that as a pass catching tight end. Von Bell. Complimented safety to Jeremy Chin. Shy tunnel to Shawn Williams. Give you some depth and productivity at defensive tackle.

I like all these moves. They re-signed Bradley Boseman. Like that. They had depth on the o-line.

Was it Justin McCray? Wow. And last year in free agency how they went out and completely redid their offensive line?

Yes. I don't know how to handle this. Smart decisions by the Panthers? Yeah I know. Some we haven't seen in a while.

And now they're obviously going to draft a quarterback with the first overall pick. We just don't know which. I mean we I'm sure all have our opinions as to who would be best. But we don't know still. I think it's Bryce Young. They're talking about I mean not they but I hear people saying that they're leading CJ Stroud.

Maybe. I don't know. Alright now what do you do in the draft? We know number one is going to be a quarterback. Number 39.

What's that going to be? I know Dennis you have a guy you'd like at 39? I say Josh Downs from UNC. Why not?

I got no problem with it. If there's Jaylen Haya from Tennessee slips down to 39. Why not? And he might.

Right? Wide receivers can drop into the early second round. If the guy you want is not there.

What about A.T. Perry of Wake Forest in a later round? Yeah. Or both.

Or both. They need a lot of help at receiving. I mean when you look at well the receivers they've got was it Terrace Marshall, Leviska Chanel Shy Smith I don't know.

I don't know. They need help. They need at least another receiver or two.

I think to be a legitimately good but you're going to have injuries. Yeah. So I think they need help. But anyway I think they put themselves in pretty good shape.

And because I think you need to hear this. The Hurricanes had their own version of March Madness Saturday night as the Canes trailed Philadelphia by a goal with seconds to play. This is not the Martine H's goal. This is a montage of March or Martine Madness. As Neches has it.

This could be it. As Burns is on site. Neches scores!

Oh what a shot! Martine Neches stay red hot! Good play by Slavin Jarvis.

He'll get it to Aho. Now Neches. Neches with the score!

Tipped out front. Carolina what a comeback to tie it at three. She takes down March Madness but Neches will get to the puck. Neches has got Spensley caught with them.

They're motoring into the star zone. Neches backhand. Spensley caught.

Rosewood. Wedgwood with the save. Still out in front. Neches scores! Martine Neches ends it in overtime.

Ben's been on the ice for a while. Neches with the seed. And he does it again! Spensley caught with it. Thirteen seconds left. Out in front. They score!

Martine Neches the man of the moment again. Ties it at four. Carolina with the comeback. And the Kings will come out with the puck. Spensley caught. He's got a step and he's got Neches with him. Spensley caught. Neches he does it again!

Alright real quick. Here's the data. It's the fourth time this year that Neches sent a game into overtime with a late third period goal. This one there was.03.

Seconds on the clock. He did it at Philly back in October. Did it at Winnipeg in November. Did it against San Jose in Raleigh. Twelve seconds left on the clock.

Saturday in Philly. He also has three overtime game winning goals. He's pretty impressed. He's worth nine points by himself. Martine Neches.

Put the number nine in Marty's locker and we'll see everybody in New York tomorrow. For a limited time, price and participation may vary at US$20. Solid card only. Single item at regular price.