NC State’s Men’s 2023-24 Basketball team will go down in history

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Visit us at CapitalFinancialUSA.com. This is the best tournament win that they just pulled off. Five wins in five days. Among craziest stories here. Triangle. North Carolina. And I put out my top five. I did not put it in my top five.

But you could make the argument that it is. Well, I don't know how to do that other than ask Tim Peeler, who is an NC State historian. You can follow him on Twitter at PacTimPeeler. He is a multiple author on all books about North Carolina State, and I appreciate his time. For at least the basketball program that essentially invented the Cinderella story. How do you put this in perspective? You know, there's never been anything like it, so you can't put it into a historical perspective from the five wins in five days. Well, that has happened before.

I'm sorry? It has happened. Five wins in five days has happened before. I forgot about NC State. Oh, okay.

Okay. But, you know, there are tournament championships that never seemed like they could have happened in 1970 when they beat unbeaten South Carolina to win the ACC championship in 1983, where they did not have to win the ACC tournament title, but it helped them get into the tournament, which they subsequently won. In 1987, when a team that was much more like this one than any other won the ACC tournament and made it into the NCAA tournament. Those four tournament championships, I think, are all very similar in what they've done out of NC State's 11 ACC championships. The other previous ones were, you know, much more dominating teams. These, the four that I just mentioned, were ones that people were surprised about. And NC State, despite what some people say, has benefited from surprise championships, unexpected championships, much more than they've been knocked out of championship opportunities through the years.

Tim Peeler is joining us here. So some of the people might not, you know, recognize the reference here. They didn't get, what, Matt Frigid, right, from, was it Vanderbilt?

Right. That is one of the ones that's always mentioned. The Chris Cortiani play against Georgetown and subsequent loss there. You know, there are a lot, Julius Hodge against Connecticut up in D.C. in the same arena where they just won. Lots of opportunities to do some things that did not pan out. But as I constantly say, NC State has benefited from great fortune, especially on the weekend of St. Patrick's Day. Then they have been dealt any, you know, major losses that people often remember the disappointments, but not necessarily all of the great things that have happened for NC State athletics. Tim Peeler is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show, NC State Historian.

Here's the thing about it. You know, we remember Valvano running around the court looking for somebody to hug. We remember the, you know, it was called, it was, I mean, was it Willie Osley? I got his name. Wally Osley. Wally Osley. That was close.

I was talking about the glass slipper fits, right? That team, you can speak to this better than I can, but that team, you know, as it was put together, were it not for some injuries, was an NCAA tournament team from the beginning anyway, right? I mean, it wasn't a 64 team field, but it was still good enough as put together to be an NCAA tournament team.

They just needed a late run to recognize that potential. Yeah, absolutely, because... Adam Gold in studio with my man coach Pete DeRuta, Capital Financial Advisory Group. You have a 401k, but you're changing jobs. You're taking that 401k with you.

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Investment advisory services offered by Capital Financial Advisory Group, a North Carolina registered investment advisor. They had some injuries during that year. They had some misfortunate things happen. Um, but into the, you know, the beginning of that year, um, they were ranked in the top 15.

It was not a bad. It never was a bad team. It was just a bad or the team that had to work through some bad circumstances, which they eventually did. After Derek Wittenberg returned to the lineup, uh, and they won. Not just the ACC tournament and the NCAA, they were able to win it all those games, all nine games of incredible fashion.

Seven and nine of the nine games. They trail by double figures in the second half and came back to win them all. Hey, and just like in 83 in the tournament, uh, Virginia had trouble making a free throw. Um, so we talked to Michael O'Connell earlier and athletes don't think about these things as they're happening because they can. If you did, you'd never be able to function on the court. But Virginia had an 85% free throw shooter, uh, on the, uh, on the line with five seconds to play roughly and a three point lead in the front end of a one and one. If he makes the free throw, it's over, right? So he misses the free throw. You get the rebound and then O'Connell banks in a three that not only did it bank in, but it banked and kind of swirled in. I don't believe Wyndham Clark would have made that three for people who watch the players championship over the weekend.

Like 80% of that ball was below ground and it still didn't stay in the hole. Uh, and he missed the, uh, missed out on a playoff, I think by one shot. Um, where does that shot? When you think about that shot, are there other shots in state lore that, you know, are, you know, that go in that same category? That exact same shot was taken by Brad Doherty at the beginning or at the end of regulation, uh, in the 1983 tournament down in Atlanta. It did the exact same thing, went around the rim three times, but popped out instead of went in and state was able to go into overtime and beat Carolina, the defending national champion.

When Derek Wittenberg came off the bench and scored 11 points in overtime or however many he did. I can't remember exactly, but that was the opposite of that, but there have been times like that, that, um, just crazy stuff has happened. And sometimes they, they swirl around and go in.

Sometimes they swirl around to go out. And the reason I knew state was going to have a good opportunity to win after Michael O'Donnell sent us the game into overtime was at that exact moment. I got a text from one of the ministers of church that said, Holy shit. And that was the entire check.

And he sent me one of the men, like a church leader sent that to you. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fine. I mean, uh, you know, you can, you can atone, you got time.

Absolutely. Um, but you know, I don't think anybody from state was asking forgiveness after any of those things that happened over the weekend. So what you're saying is that there is no such thing as NC state stuff.

Oh, that's such a bad and awful and no good mean that it's not even worth talking about. Uh, but it, you know, it creates a lot of t-shirts and, uh, and what, what, whatever I just, I can give you for every time you, you can tell me that something bad has happened in the state. I can tell you about something good, such as going into the first ACC tournament in 1954 as the fourth seed with not much of a chance of winning and then winning. Handily, uh, throughout the course of that game, same thing happened in 1955, 1959 when they were playing North Carolina in Reynolds Coliseum. There's so many times in 1965, um, so many times state was an underdog and came out on top so many more times when they were in, then when they were an over dog and something bad happened to them.

Tim Peeler, NC state historian joining us here on the Adam Gold show at pack Tim Peeler on Twitter. That was just specific to this team. Like I've been talking about this team all year and you've covered, you've covered hoops, uh, longer than I've been here. And what struck me about this team is that what we're seeing now is probably the team we should have seen over the course of the season.

And we just were never able to get to it on a regular basis. I'm not saying that they should have been, you know, uh, 15 and five in the ACC, but the, I know the season didn't end well, but they had a hard time finding consistent performances from more players than DJ Horn this year. Now that we're finally starting to see it, do we think that this team is like what we thought it was maybe two months ago? Yeah.

And here's the point that I like to make. I made it to the people I talked to before the game on Saturday night. This is a, an experienced team, right? They have a lot of older players, like most good college teams. They have gone to the portal.

They've gotten older players and sometimes it takes a while to, uh, to mesh, right? Yeah. So you, you know, I have written as much, um, mostly complimentary things about Jim Valvano than anybody else on the planet through the years. But Jim Valvano was not a great regular season coach. He did not believe in having a superlative regular season. If it meant he could have a superlative postseason.

Right. And if you go back to the 1987 championship, um, that was a team that had lost six straight games at one point, lost his point guard midway through the season. Because he just left the team. He was throwing people in, he was throwing different lineups, even in the NCC, the ACC tournament, he threw a different lineup, uh, out on the floor. And he always thought you should use the regular season to build towards the postseason. And I think that's what makes this team more analogous to, uh, any other ACC championship team that NC State has put on the floor. Um, than any other that season in particular was full of turmoil, full of personnel changes, full, full of him putting different combinations together. And I think that's what Kevin Keats did really, really well throughout the tournament.

He had five different game plans that he used through the course of the weekend, uh, or the week, and then into the weekend, he had different answers for everything. And let's face it, the, the, the championship game really wasn't close. Um, State led by double figures in the first ten minutes, or the first five minutes of the game.

They lost the lead a couple of times, but, uh, Carolina had no lead at all in the final 19 minutes of the game. Yeah, I was, um, I think my favorite part from a State perspective, and I've been, uh, I've been accused of being a Carolina fan about this. It's just, uh, sorry, I've been accused by Carolina fans of being a State homer about this.

Uh, I try, I've tried very hard to not be a homer for anybody, uh, at any point. Um, my, but, I think my favorite thing about the way the State won was that they got up big early, they, Carolina got up off the mat and actually led it to half by one. And the, you know, the way these things generally work is that you had your chance, and you let that chance go, and the favorite is going to come out, and they're going to do what they do in the second half, especially since UNC has been a second half team all year long. And NC State did it again, and they did it to Duke both times. NC State won the first five minutes of the first half and the second half against Duke, and they did it to North Carolina too.

And, to me, that was the most impressive thing about it. You know, that, that was the thing when I, the five or six years that I covered Dean Smith in North Carolina, uh, in the 90s, was that they always did so well. They would jump out on you and maybe something would happen, but his philosophy was always last five minutes of the first half and the first five minutes of the second half would always determine where his teams would go in, especially the big games throughout. They would, they would let someone, you know, he would often go into the 10 minute mark of the first half, you know, with not much of a lead or a small deficit or something like that. But his team's philosophy was always to own that last five minutes of the first half.

Then you get a lead and take away a lead, take away somebody's momentum, and then you come back out and jump over in the first five minutes of the second half. And I saw that so many times during that time. And, you know, obviously Roy Williams did the same kind of thing. That was part of what he wanted to do.

Obviously, that's what Hubert Davis wanted to do. But give NC State all the credit in the world, trailing at the half, they came out and took over the game. Even when Carolina wanted to run and take some of that momentum back, they didn't let them do it. And then forced North Carolina, which looked the more tired of the two teams, to miss 12 of the last 13 shots.

Yeah, they did. In spite of the fact that NC State played five games in five days, which I've always thought is a little bit overrated. These guys, these kids practice every day for however long. They can play. And adrenaline is powerful.

I totally agree. And it wasn't so much – they were clearly tired at times. I happened to be sitting right beside them, right behind the bench a couple of rows back. They were tired. You could see that.

They were cramping up every now and then. Things like that happened. But the thing was, because of DJ Burns and some other players on the team, they were always loose. They were always looking like they were having fun.

Looking like this meant everything in the world to them. Whereas, you know, I saw a couple of times, Hubert Davis was on the other sideline. He was angry. I'm not so sure he was angry with officials or the circumstances of the game as much as he was angry with his own players.

No, I agree. There was a time in the game where he yelled at Armando – it might have been the game before – where he yelled at Armando, not to Armando Bacot, but to one of his assistants, what the blank is Armando doing? Right? So, look, DJ Burns – I owe him a huge apology. DJ Burns was great in this tournament.

In every way you can be great. So, I had been very critical of DJ over the course of the year. Maybe I was right then, but doesn't mean that you can't resurrect your season. And I think DJ Burns absolutely did that. Tim Peeler, NC State Historian.

Do you have any closing remarks, sir? I was just going to say that I told DJ Burns after the game that nobody could carry the weight of NC State's fan base and its supporters more than somebody who had tree trunks for legs like he did. And he carried the weight of 13,523 days without an ACC championship better than anybody could have imagined. And the good thing is he's got such a great personality. He has the ability to carry that.

And he refused to go into the postgame locker room to talk to the media until he had taken a picture with the NC State pep band. I love that. Oh, man.

I look forward to a nice run in this tournament, too. Tim Peeler, NC State Historian. At pack Tim Peeler on Twitter. My man, I'll talk to you soon. Anytime. Thanks a bunch. Thank you. Tim Peeler here on the Adam Gold Show.