If N.C. State hadn’t lost Devon Daniels and Thomas Allen at midseason, the Wolfpack might not even have considered playing in the NIT. With them, it would have been an older team with less to gain from the experience of playing in this particular NIT, which just about everyone agrees is slightly less than ideal.
The prospect of waiting a week between games in exurban Dallas made more sense for a Wolfpack roster that veered sharply toward youth in the final month of the season -- especially for the newly important freshman who got their first, brief postseason experience in Greensboro.
“I didn’t think any of those guys played great against Syracuse,” N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts said Wednesday. “Not that I thought they were bad. But they played as though they were young guys.”
That loss to Syracuse in the ACC tournament ended a five-game winning streak and removed any hopes of a longshot NCAA tournament bid, but it did reinforce Keatts’ desire to get his trio of freshmen more experience in those situations.
So N.C. State is in Texas to play Davidson on Thursday, -- a game that could just as easily have been played in Greensboro -- and wouldn’t play again until next Thursday’s quarterfinals with a win. That’s a long stay in a makeshift bubble that doesn’t quite have the amenities of the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments. (Things pick up after that: The NIT wraps up with three games in four days and there will be a third-place game for the first time in 18 years to make the extra time worthwhile for the losing semifinalists.)
The hope is that one game Thursday, and perhaps that week of waiting and what may come after it, will pay dividends not so much now, but over the next three seasons. It’s a wager on the future.
There are rewards to playing in the NIT for everyone on the roster, whether it’s a chance for Braxton Beverly and DJ Funderburk to extend their careers or Jericole Hellems and Manny Bates to hone their skills. But it’s the freshmen -- Cam Hayes, Dereon Seabron and Shakeel Moore -- all of whom have had bigger and bigger roles forced upon them over the course of the season, especially over the past month, who have the most to gain.
For them, it’s less about tangible goals than it is the mere experience of playing in one-and-done games, becoming familiar with the new routines of a neutral site, feeling the pressure of elimination for only the second time. N.C. State was sent home from its only neutral-site event in December after a positive test in the travel party. Greensboro came and went too quickly. This is all that’s left.
“I want to see that growth,” Keatts said. “Because as we move forward, as we advance, you want to see that, so the next opportunity they have next year to be able to play in some postseason games, whether it becomes the ACC tournament or the NCAA, they’ve already had that under their belt. I can’t teach them what they’ve never been through. These guys, it’s all new to them. I just want them to grow from what they did in the one game we played in the ACC tournament.”
These are obviously vastly different circumstances than two years ago, when N.C. State went on a run in the NIT that rocked Reynolds Coliseum and brought the Wolfpack within a game of a trip to Madison Square Garden. But the majority of that team did come back a year later and put N.C. State in a position to go back to the NCAA tournament, and it was 1-0 in the postseason when everything shut down.
If N.C. State beats Davidson and has a week to kill, it’s a small price to pay now if it helps in the future.
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NIT: NC STATE VS. DAVIDSON
When: 7 p.m., Thursday
Watch: ESPN
