NC State basketball was a miracle short against Pitt. Wolfpack is going to need a few now

At the end, after Michael O’Connell missed a free throw he needed to make, N.C. State needed him to miss the second free throw and then conjure up a miracle.

That little sequence at the end of the game also sums up the situation facing the Wolfpack. Thanks to a bunch of missed free throws against Pittsburgh, N.C. State now needs a miracle.

It came into Wednesday’s 67-64 loss a commendable 7-4 in the ACC, not in the NCAA tournament picture at the moment but with several winding paths still open to it. By the time the Wolfpack returns to PNC Arena in a little less than two weeks, there’s a better-than-average chance it’ll be .500 with very few outs left.

Up next: At Wake Forest. After that: At Clemson. So, yeah. N.C. State’s in the miracle-hunting business now. Of course, with great peril comes great opportunity, and these are the coveted Quadrant 1 wins the Wolfpack so desperately needs.

But you’d sure rather be in a position where they aren’t must-wins.

They are now.

“We can’t lose anymore, man,” said D.J. Horne, who had a game-high 25 points. “We want to get to March. That’s why I came here. We’ve got to figure out what we’ve got to do. We’ve got some Quad 1 opportunities left on our schedule but it’s not like it’s easy. So we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and figure out what we need to do to win.”

In the grand scheme of the ACC and the NCAA tournament picture, a home game like this against Pittsburgh is a sort-of free throw on the schedule: Nothing is given, and successful execution is required, but a good team is expected to finish the job.

Which is exactly what N.C. State couldn’t do Wednesday, literally or figuratively. The Wolfpack went 6-for-15 from the line, although the ninth miss was deliberate, an attempt to set up a miracle game-tying shot. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, went 18-for-20. It’s not as simple as that — it’s never as simple as that — because there were any number of areas where the Wolfpack could have scrounged up another three points, but that was the easiest way to do it.

“It was an equal game and if you throw (the stat sheet) out and I show you one team was 18-for-20 and one team was 6-for-15? That’s the ballgame,” N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts said. “We can go back and watch tape and I can evaluate it and I can say we could have (scored) this possession or gotten this rebound here, but at the end of the day we have to step up and knock our free throws down.”

Just as there are other ways N.C. State can make up ground in the race for an NCAA berth — like winning at Wake Forest and Clemson, or winning the ACC tournament for the first time since 1987 — but taking care of business at home against teams like Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech, or picking up road wins against a middling opponent like Syracuse instead of no-showing the entire first half, is an easier way to do it.

Ben Middlebrooks gave N.C. State some energy in the first half when both the Wolfpack and the sparse PNC Arena crowd seemed asleep on their feet, and D.J. Burns had his best and most aggressive offensive performance in months, turning back the clock to last season. Horne made shots on a night when the rest of the Wolfpack backcourt struggled, not only on offense but containing Jaland Lowe, the second of Pitt’s two freshman point guards who started slower than teammate Carlton Carrington but is catching up fast.

But the Wolfpack gave up eight straight points to close out the first half after fighting back to tie the score at 30, and went 1-for-6 from the floor after fighting back to tie the score at 60, the only field goal Mo Diarra’s putback of a Casey Morsell 3-point miss.

That left the Wolfpack down three with 5 seconds to play. Pitt fouled O’Connell to prevent a game-tying shot. Even before he missed the first, N.C. State needed a miracle. On this night, none was forthcoming. The Wolfpack will have to hope there’s one somewhere down the line.

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