NC State’s Michael O’Connell has been a March Madness hero. His coach called it
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Apr 3 '24, 09:24
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By Kyle Tucker (The Athletic)
As if there weren’t enough evidence that NC State is a team of destiny, having flipped some magical switch to transform from NIT-bound to Final Four-bound with nine straight victories in less than three weeks, just wait. It gets crazier. The guy who banked in the 3-pointer that kept the dream from dying on the vine in the ACC semifinals? He’s had this voicemail from assistant coach Joel Justus saved on his phone since last May:
"We would not be recruiting you — we would not be bringing you in on a visit — if we didn’t think you could come here, start, play a major role for our team, help us win an ACC championship and help us get to at least the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. Holler at me later. See ya. Go Pack."
Both sender and receiver sort of forgot about that message until last week.
“Someone mentioned in the course of normal conversation, ‘We’re going to the second weekend,’ and that wording just sparked in the back of my mind,” senior point guard Michael O’Connell says. “Second weekend? Oh, my God, I have a voicemail from Coach about this. I went back and listened to it. I sent it to Coach. The fact that it’s come true — and we’ve even exceeded it — is kind of unbelievable. He called it.”
Justus left that message a few days before O’Connell, a Stanford transfer, visited Raleigh last spring to see if he and the Wolfpack were a good fit. Justus wished him luck on his final exams in Palo Alto before making that bold proclamation. State hadn’t won an ACC regular-season or tournament title since 1989. It hadn’t made the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament in almost a decade. It hadn’t made a Final Four since 1983.
So why say such an audacious thing?
“I really believed we had a chance to be good. I thought our group even before him was nice. So Michael was kind of like the last piece in my mind,” Justus says. “I thought we were missing a solid point guard who was a distributor. Great teams have multiple guys who can create for other people, and we needed one more. Our other guards were just so wired to score, so we needed a guy who, when you just have to get the ball to the right person, could get that done.”
His vision was even bigger than O’Connell, who averaged a modest 6.3 points and 3.2 assists in 89 career games at Stanford, imagined for himself. Another snippet of the voicemail: Don’t let anybody get into your mind and give you any reason to doubt that you’re a great player. Maybe it was just a recruiting pitch, but none of his other suitors spoke with such certainty about what O’Connell could become. He was sold.
“I was weighing my options,” O’Connell says, “but having a coach who has this unbelievable confidence in you is kind of hard to pass up.”
And yet, this was not an instant fairytale. He didn’t move into the Wolfpack’s starting lineup until the last day of January. After 31 regular-season games, State was 17-14, with no shot at an at-large invitation to the NCAA Tournament. O’Connell had averaged just 22 minutes, only 3.8 field-goal attempts, 4.5 points, 3.0 assists and shot 29 percent from 3. There was nothing to suggest March heroics on the horizon.
His parents only packed for two days at the ACC tournament in Washington, D.C. And then …
“We just kept staying there, staying there, staying there. They just kept winning, kept winning, kept winning,” says O’Connell’s father, Tim. “Each day they played, more and more people drove in from New York to see this crazy thing that was happening. At one point, we were 50-deep.”
Michael had scored in double figures just three times in 31 regular-season games. Naturally, he dropped 16 on Louisville in the first round of the conference tournament. Then 16 on Syracuse in the second round. Then a dozen on Duke in the quarterfinals and a dozen more against Virginia in the semis. That’s the game he’ll be remembered for, when he heaved in a desperation 3 against the Cavaliers to force overtime. Without that shot — or Virginia’s Isaac McKneely missing the front end of a one-and-one to keep the Wolfpack alive — the only thing this NC State team would be remembered for is getting head coach Kevin Keatts fired.
But O’Connell nailed it, just like he sank a driving and-one in the final seconds of regulation against Oakland in the second round of the NCAA Tournament and buried a back-breaking 3 against Duke in the Elite Eight, so Keatts is suddenly enjoying rock-solid job security. Much more than that. He and this team are now etched into NC State history.
To the casual fan, the Wolfpack’s two DJs — Burns and Horne — are the main attractions, the reason this is all happening. But if not for O’Connell playing the best basketball of his life over the last month, America might never have gotten a chance to fall in love with Burns, the dancing bear whose personality is as big as the gap in his infectious grin. O’Connell has averaged 10.2 points, 4.1 assists, 4.0 rebounds, 1.2 steals and shot 50 percent from 3-point range during this nine-game winning streak. He’s become the player Justus imagined.
“I’ve always been a point guard who wants to facilitate and get everybody else involved, but people are focusing a lot more on taking away both DJs and Casey (Morsell), and it’s just opened up many more opportunities for me,” says O’Connell, who has nearly doubled his regular-season average for shot attempts. “In this moment, it felt like the team needed me to be more in attack mode. The coaches have always said if I have an open shot, take it. Joel and I work out together all the time and he’s stayed on me about it. That kind of confidence from him gives me confidence too.”
Justus ought to buy a lottery ticket and tell O’Connell it’s going to win. Fate is a funny thing, though. Change one detail and the whole amazing story dissolves into a tantalizing what-if.
What if O’Connell picked another program after graduating with an economics degree from Stanford in three years?
“For the people wearing bowties and smoking pipes, the academic people, they’re more impressed he did that than hitting the shot against Virginia,” his father says.
What if O’Connell picked lacrosse instead of basketball? He was a top-100 recruit in both sports. His brother, Thomas, went to three Final Fours and won the 2017 national championship with the Maryland lacrosse team — then walked on to the St. John’s basketball team for his final year of college. Michael originally committed to the Terrapins for lacrosse before flipping to basketball. He’s thought for years that he might do the reverse of his brother’s plan, spend his last year in college on a lacrosse team.
“But I’m trying to live in the moment right now, stay present with this opportunity at hand,” he says. “You never know what happens next, but the way this is going, if this success continues, it’ll be hard to go away from basketball. It’s funny how life works out.”
Justus did not remember the voicemail from last spring. He was confused when Tim O’Connell hugged him on the court in Pittsburgh, after the Wolfpack punched their ticket to the Sweet 16, and told him, “You know you called this, right?”
“I was like, ‘Huh?’ Then Michael sends me the voicemail,” Justus says. “I was in a little bit of disbelief about two things: that it was so on point — although I guess I even undersold it — and that he kept it. Kids these days don’t even get voicemails. It was probably easy for him to find, because it’s probably the only voicemail he’s ever gotten in his life. He probably thought it was an artifact. Look at this old dude recruiting me with … voicemail.”
Justus had told O’Connell’s father something similar over the phone last spring, that his boy could be a starter for an ACC champion and second-weekend NCAA Tournament team.
“I joked with him: ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ He just laughed. He said no, he just really believed in my Michael,” Tim O’Connell says. “The other day after the game, he smiled at me and said, ‘I wasn’t lying, was I?’ It gives me chills. You can’t script something like this, but he … kinda did. I mean, it’s unbelievable, right?”
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