North Carolina State University Athletics
Tony Haynes: Reynolds Rumbles Again In NIT
3/15/2007 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
BY TONY HAYNES
RALEIGH, N.C. – On the day he was hired to become NC State’s 18th head basketball coach last May, Sidney Lowe spoke with great fondness about the Wolfpack’s rich basketball tradition. But on that day, not even he could have conceived of the possibility that his first team would end up playing a postseason game in the very building that still symbolizes the Pack’s place in college basketball lore.
Reynolds Coliseum, otherwise known as the “House That Case Built,” was the famed home of NC State basketball between 1949-1999. Everett Case coached there. So did Norm Sloan and Jim Valvano. Legendary players, too numerous to mention, thrilled basketball fans with their exploits inside the hallowed brick walls of a building that was once the largest on campus facility in the south.
Now, Lowe’s team will return to Reynolds in hopes of keeping its season alive in the second round of the NIT. The opponent will be Marist (25-8), which afforded NC State (19-15) the opportunity of playing a home game by shocking Oklahoma State on Tuesday, 67-64.
The Wolfpack and Red Foxes will meet Friday night at 9:30. Airtime on the Wolfpack Sports Network is set for 9 p.m.
“It’s going to be sold out and it’s going to be loud,” said Lowe, who played his home games at Reynolds when he was the Pack’s point guard in the early 1980s. “I don’t think our players have ever experienced anything like they’re going to experience on Friday.”
NC State did play its annual heritage game at the coliseum back in December, whipping Savannah State 74-53, but the excitement surrounding that particular game can’t match what’s going on now.
After watching NC State make an improbable run to the ACC championship game over the weekend in Tampa and then follow that up with a come-from-behind win at Drexel on Tuesday night, the Wolfpack Nation is fired up. It took only three hours for Wolfpack Club members to snatch up all available tickets for the Marist game on Wednesday.
With their regular home, the RBC Center, already occupied on Friday night, NC State’s players may actually be stepping into something they’ll likely remember for the rest of their lives.
“They’ve never been in the environment that they’re going to be in, I can almost guarantee that,” Lowe said. “There will be NC State fans at their finest and their best in Reynolds. It’s just a different atmosphere. I’m just glad that we have another arena that we can still call home.”
The last thing Lowe and the Pack needed was another road game, not after playing four straight days at the ACC Tournament in Tampa and then having to turn right around and travel for a game 48 hours later at Drexel in Philadelphia.
Lowe gave his weary team Wednesday off and didn’t plan a lot of physical activity for the players on Thursday.
“The most important thing for us was to get off of our feet and rest those legs,” said Lowe, whose team played five games in six days from Thursday of last week through Tuesday. “Mentally, I think we’re there in terms of knowing the offense and knowing what to do. Now we have to start implementing things that we want to do against Marist. That becomes the mental part of the game. As far as the rest was concerned, it was important for us to have those couple of days because I know our guys were tired.”
Marist’s style offensively is somewhat similar to NC State’s.
Deliberate and patient on the offensive end, Marist, like the Wolfpack, will employ a lot of pick-and-roll actions. And why not? The offense is set up to accommodate the skills of point guard Jared Jordan. A crafty 6-2 senior, Jordan is the first player since Avery Johnson to lead the nation in assists two years in a row. Johnson, now the coach of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, was the NCAA’s No. 1 assist man at Southern University in 1987 and 1988.
Jordan, who averages eight-plus assists per game, is also second on his team in scoring with an average of more than 17 points per contest. Shooting guard Will Whittington, who put up 31 in the win at Oklahoma State, is Marist’s top scorer (17.5 ppg.).
“They execute their offense very well,” Lowe said. “They have excellent spacing with their offense, and then they have guys who can shoot the basketball. Whittington can flat out knock it down. This is a game where we have to be not only patient on the offensive end, but more importantly, we have to be patient on the defensive end. We have to have the mindset where we have to play defense for 25 or 30 seconds. We have to be patient on the defensive end and mentally tough enough to fight through the fact that they’re going to force us to chase them around. We’re going to have to get stops because this team can shoot the basketball.”
With 357 3-point baskets, Whittington, a 6-3 senior, is now 16th on the NCAA’s career list. As a team, the Red Foxes knock down nine 3-pointers per game to rank 14th in the nation. Marist finished first in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference regular season race with a 14-4 league mark.
Not only would a victory on Friday allow NC State to advance to the next round for a meeting with either West Virginia or Massachusetts, it would also give the Wolfpack a 20-win season for the fifth time in the last six years. For a team that was picked to finish dead last in the ACC, that would be quite an accomplishment.
And perhaps it would be apropos for it to happen inside the venerable old building that has produced so many memorable Wolfpack basketball moments over the years.
Wolfpack On The Mark: NC State has shot 50 percent or better in five consecutive games. For the season, the Wolfpack is hitting 49.4 percent from the floor… The Pack has come from behind to win in three of its last five games. The most impressive of those comebacks came against Virginia in the ACC Tournament. Trailing by 14 at the break, State stormed back to win 79-71. The Pack trailed Drexel 15-4 before rallying to post a 63-56 victory…Redshirt freshman Brandon Costner, who scored a school record 90 points in the ACC Tournament, is averaging 18.8 points over his last nine games…Friday night’s game will mark only the fifth time NC State has played at home since January 24…Friday’s contest will also be the ninth postseason game of senior point guard Engin Atsur’s career. Atsur was a starter on NCAA Tournament teams his first three years.
