Ilian Evtimov Quotes (36 Quotes)

I guess we're going to go in under the radar now. People are going to say that we're not playing real well. But that's not a bad situation to be in, knowing that you are a very good basketball team that's just going through a bad stretch.

If anybody thinks that North Carolina State is not successful and thinks North Carolina State is not becoming a better program over the last few years, I'm sorry, but I would have to call them an idiot.

I felt like Craig Smith was running at me and someone was going to have a better shot than I did. Should I have taken the shot Maybe, I don't know that. We all makes mistakes, and that's a mistake I made. I have to live with it.

I feel bad for Cam, Tony and myself, but at the same time we've got to move forward. This is the last game at home, for sure, but there's a lot of season left. There's one more season game, and we'll go into the ACC Tournament. We'll play as well as we can so we can get a good seed in the NCAA Tournament. It's sad, true, but it's not the end of the world.

We were playing unselfishly early in the game and were in a really good rhythm. Everybody is comfortable with each other out there. When we don't play like that is when we get in trouble.

They had to work really hard on offense to get open looks. We did a great job on Justin Gray, to the point where their coach had to make an adjustment because he was not touching the ball.

We know we didn't play well, North Carolina just whipped us tonight. It's going to take some character for us to come back. We're either going to respond or we're going to fold. We're going to have to come out smoking the next game.

We were two points away from making it an even game. But in the second half we didn't get those stops and convert those points in transition like we did in the first half. That was the difference.

It's getting better every day. But I'm not going to say it feels good. I felt pain with every step.

That's part of adversity -- somebody going down and somebody stepping up. I think Gavin Grant has been playing great for us. We just need to have more guys playing well.

We just have not played good defense lately. That's not our character. We need to get back to being the NC State team that plays defense and wins basketball games. We can't rely on our offense to win games. Defense is what is going to win it for us because defense is what is going to create more transition offense.

I hope this year is not judged by our last four losses because we had a very good season. We should be judged by our good body of work.

We need to regroup and get our confidence back. We just lost three in a row, and to this point, we had not lost more than one in a row. We have to pick it up in practice. That's where it all starts. We have to communicate with each other and become a stronger family now by staying tight.

That's such a good feeling to get when you're on the court, and you're doing that to the other team. And you know that even though you're ahead, you're stomping and you keep playing hard, you keep playing defense.

I think the reason why Seton Hall was so good was we made them so good. We beat ourselves. We didn't do anything good. We didn't play good defense. We didn't play good offense. We didn't rebound the ball. We didn't get any transition offense. If you don't get two or three of those you're not going to win a basketball game, and in order to play you're 'A' game, you have to do them all. But, you know, we stunk tonight. We were awful tonight.

This was definitely supposed to be a test, and I think we did pretty good on it. We knew they were a very good team. We knew if we didn't play our game we could very easily lose. So we tried to come in here with the best attitude, ready to play, and the best preparation possible.

It's an ugly, embarrassing loss. We missed our shots and they made theirs.

All of this is just a distraction from the media. We're not going to let that affect us. We're going to believe in what we do, and at the end of the day that is what is going to make us successful.

I think that will make a big difference for us. We can have a great year if we do that.

This is giving us a lot of experience come March. It's putting us in situations where we're finding ways to win each time. Wins like this give us a lot of confidence that we can finish games when it's close. We've been ahead, we've been behind, we've been tied. So all that experience is going to pay off in March.

Our maturity and experience showed. We finished this game like you're supposed to.... We made plays.

We missed Cam today. It showed.

There's no question we're facing a lot of adversity right now. The young guys, sometimes they just look at you with the big eyes, but they don't know what to do. They expect seniors to know how to take the lead.

Carolina and Duke, those were two games we should have won. And you know, we've learned from them. We're very tough mentally now. We don't want to give up.

We didn't play hard enough tonight. We didn't get rebounds because we didn't do a good job boxing out. The Tar Heels crashed the boards and got just about every rebound.

We've been sidelined for a while now, and it's affecting our chemistry on the court.

We have to go in and beat Wake Forest, that's all we can control right now.

Instead of winning games by two or three points in double overtime, we can win those games by 10 or 15 points, you know

We're going to watch film and stuff, but nothing looked good. All of this scouting and stuff we did, what good does it do if we don't play hard enough to get the rebound or box out or get the loose ball

Now it's our business to keep on moving forward.

It was beautiful to watch. Everybody was playing unselfishly.

We knew he likes to post up on the block, but he really doesn't mind posting up off the lane. He's going to ask for the ball until he catches it. If you front him, he's going to try to get around you and he'll go way out there. He wants the ball, so he'll go get it even if he has to go far away from the basket. So we were able to push him outside. And, we knew he likes to go right, so we had a lot of help coming from the middle if he was on the left, and from the baseline if he was on the right.

Gavin's been practicing really hard lately. He's really focusing more on defense and playing more aggressive than he had to this point in his career. I think when you do that in practice you can gain trust from Coach, and I think Coach trusts him enough now to put him in that situation.

That's not us. That's not N.C. State defense. That's not our character. That's not our identity. They kept scoring at will.

I think it's more nerve-wracking being on the sidelines than it is being on the court. When you're on the court, you have the confidence that you can win. You know you're in charge of your destiny, you're in charge of what happens out there. When you're on the sidelines, you don't have any control. So it was tough watching.

The stat sheet says it all. We are unselfish. We don't really care who shoots or scores, as long as we get the W.