Ilian Evtimov Win Quotations

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

These are the kind of wins you want, where you have to dig in and grind it out. Those wins are the best.

Those four games we had to put behind us, and this win we have to put behind us too. We've just got to put the past behind. We had a good season, we deserve to be here.

I don't know if it's a relief or not, because it's one and done at this point and you've got to put this win behind just like the losses you put behind. If you want to succeed on Sunday, you can't get too happy and you can't be satisfied. You've got to stay hungry. Like Julius (Hodge) said, 'When you're hungry, you eat.' And that's the mentality we've got to have right now.

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.

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 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.

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.