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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

January 31, 2011

Sidney Lowe

SIDNEY LOWE: Well, just trying to bounce back, two losses on the road, didn't play well at Carolina, and we've got to try to win this one on Wednesday against Virginia Tech.

Q. One of the constants you talked about last year was how hard the team played, and one of the things you said at the beginning of the season was the one thing you know is this team will play hard. Is that the same with this group, or was Saturday just an aberration?
SIDNEY LOWE: I think this group will play hard. I think Saturday, I think that was just a game -- I don't know, it was a weird game, you know, because guys seemed to be ready in the locker room, ready to go, were excited, had good energy and anticipation, and I think initially when -- I've said this before, when we don't hit a few shots early, our defense seems to suffer a little bit. Our energy goes down, and we can't have that. That's part of I want to say the youth part of it. But we have to be better at overcoming that early, I guess, drought of not hitting shots and picking up on the defensive end.
I think, for example, the Clemson game, I thought we came out with great energy and played hard, and they made their run, but I thought for a period of time we played pretty hard.
I think one of the things we haven't done, and we've talked about this before, is to play that full 40 minutes. You know, we put together 30 minutes, 25 minutes, then we have that drought. We haven't put together that 40 minutes of just tough, tough basketball.
So there's no question this team can do it. I think Saturday's ballgame just was a bad game. They picked the wrong time, too, to do that against a team like that.

Q. I'm sure many people probably figured that once you got Tracy Smith back this team would be a team to be reckoned with in the ACC. For you why hasn't that happened so far in the ACC season?
SIDNEY LOWE: Well, I think it's been the inconsistency of play, and not just from young guys, or just the inconsistency all the way around of having -- I can't remember really the last time we had a game where we had -- where everyone just played well, you know, where we shot the ball well, where starters played well, guys off the bench played well. You know, we haven't had that in a while.
Having Tracy back certainly helps, but we still need other people to play well for us. You know, we can't have -- we've had a couple times now where we would take maybe three or four of the players that are playing the majority of the minutes, and they might go 4 for 16 or 4 for 18, you know, so we can't do that.
But the other aspect of that, too, is with Tracy back, we should be better defensively. I don't think we've taken advantage of that. I don't think we've defended well the way we need to. I don't think our post players have defended well the last few games. We need to do a better job there.
But there's no question having him back certainly gives us more options as far as scarring, and now we have to take advantage of that. But we need to get a game where we have more than two guys playing well.

Q. I'm sure probably Wolfpack fans are thinking there's plenty of ball left to play in the season, but is this going to be another losing ACC season? Are you concerned that this could be that case or do you kind of see some signs that this is going to be a better season than it has been in recent years?
SIDNEY LOWE: Well, I mean, there's still time for that. We need to get some work done, though. I mean, we need to go to work, and like I said, we need more guys to play well for us. We need more guys to play well. We need more guys to be more aggressive. We need to rebound the ball better. We were at a point where we were out-rebounding our opponents, and now we're getting killed on the boards now, so those are our bigs getting in there and getting rebounds.
We might have it where one day C.J. Leslie might get seven, eight rebounds, nine rebounds, and he normally is up there getting a few and Richard gets some, but we need Tracy Smith and DeShawn Painter to get some boards for us. We need Scott Wood to get in there and get some boards. We need to rebound the ball better.
Our defense at times has been pretty good. I mean, the first half of the Carolina game we held them to 37 percent shooting, and that was with 14 offensive rebounds and 13 second-chance points, and we still shot only 37 percent, which is great. But we gave up those second opportunities, which kills you, especially when you're not scoring.
But there's a lot of time left. You know, we still have nine games left. We have played -- we've lost five games, and the five games we lost are to the top five teams in our conference, four of which have been on the road. So when you look at that, we're the only team that's played that type of schedule with those particular teams, and then the one team we lost to at home was to Duke.
It's been a tough schedule, but there's still plenty of time. You know, last year our team won six out of the last eight ballgames, so there's still time.

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