Deacons look for answers after early exit

Wake Forest's basketball team was built for speed this season, not for the long haul to Detroit and the Final Four.

The great promise of January was dashed in March when the No. 4-seed Deacons, everybody's darling after winning their first 16 games of the season, became everybody's punch line by losing to 13th-seed Cleveland State in the biggest upset -- according to seeds -- of this season's first round of the NCAA Tournament.

The 84-69 setback to the Vikings of the Horizon League really shouldn't have been all that surprising to anyone who saw how flat the Deacons fell against Maryland in last week's first round of the ACC Tournament.

Something wasn't right with the Deacons, something that Coach Dino Gaudio said he couldn't put his finger on.

Even though he tried.

"I even called a couple of parents of a couple of kids and asked, ‘Is he all right? Does he have girlfriend problems or anything?' " Gaudio said after Friday night's loss. "And they're just like, ‘No Coach, this one's fine and that one's fine.' So I just don't know.

"We didn't look like ourselves down at the ACC Tournament. We just missed so many shots. But I'm telling you, at our practice (Thursday), we were practicing hard. We had a lot of intensity.

"I don't know, maybe it's just going through the stages I guess of growing up in certain areas and maturing."

Wake Forest's goal for the season was stated early and often. The Deacons set their sights on Detroit and the Final Four, and Gaudio, from the first day he met with the team, told them how to get there.

The three factors for success, he said, would be to get good leadership, develop strong chemistry and eliminate all distractions. There was little apparent leadership or chemistry in the final two games of the season, and the Deacons did look distracted.

So while Cleveland State prepared for today's second-round game against Arizona, the Deacons headed home with a 24-7 final record. L.D. Williams said the loss was the worst thing to happen to him since his grandfather died.

"We're a team that's supposed to be in Detroit," Williams said. "A lot of people talked about how we could get to Detroit. To lose in the first round to a pretty good Cleveland State team, it's devastating.

"I can't put it into words."

Williams, when asked about the team's chemistry, described the Deacons as cohesive. But he acknowledged, without providing specifics, that they weren't always reading the same lines of the script.

"We've just got to make sure everybody's on the same page," Williams said. "We'd have one guy flipping through page 12 and everybody else was on page 15.

"We're a cohesive group. We're just not always on the same page."

Gaudio said Friday night that leadership wasn't always what it should have been. And few things can be more distracting to a college-basketball team of today than talk of players leaving the program early for professional basketball.

Sophomores Jeff Teague and James Johnson and freshman Al-Farouq Aminu have all been projected by various sources as first-round picks -- if not lottery picks -- although Gaudio says the NBA officials he's talking with are telling him all three need another season of college.

Johnson and Teague are both on record as saying they plan to return next season. Aminu has said he wants to return, if he doesn't feel compelled by financial considerations to make himself available to the Draft.

Friday night, Johnson at least talked like a player coming back.

"For our season to be over, it's not over," Johnson said. "It's what we do in the off-season that's going to help us build this program and make it as strong as we can."

But Teague, when asked a direct question Friday concerning his plans, hedged.

"I'll be back hopefully," Teague said. "Hopefully I'll be back.

"I mean I don't want to say nothing and then look like a liar or anything like that."

Gaudio expressed confidence that next year's team will have all three, along with incoming freshmen C.J. Harris, Ari Stewart and Torgrim Summerfeldt. If so, the Deacons are almost certain to begin the season ranked in the Top 10, if not the Top 5.

"From what I hear from those kids, and their parents, all of them know they need to come back," Gaudio said. "All of them know. When I talk to their parents, none of them told me that (the player is leaving).

"Nothing shocks me anymore, but I have a very good feeling about all of them."

But the Deacons had a much different feeling for the way a season that began with such promise came crashing to an end.

"I've never felt this way in my life," junior Ish Smith said. "It's a tough feeling.

"I hate losing more than anything and to taste this, it really hurts."

■ Dan Collins can be reached at 727-7323 or at dcollins@wsjournal.com.