305 1997 ACC Men's Basketball Tournament 1

Before the game began Coach Smith assembled the team and made a speech to motivate the players, he did not do it in every game and only in the most important games, it gave even more pressure to the players.

"9, 12 and 0, do you know what these three numbers represent this season?"

"At the beginning of the season we had a 9-win streak, and we lost to the Wake Forest Demon team and our winning streak dropped to 0 and our losing streak went to 1."

"In today's game our winning streak is 12, does anyone want to see that number turn 0 again? If you don't want to see this don't think about losing this game."

"With that only 4 games left until the end of Regular Season, and we are in first place at the conference which is a great honor, I want to continue like this and have no defeat for the next games."