It's bubble time again for the Virginia Tech men's basketball team.

In recent years, the Hokies fell off the NCAA tournament bubble and had to settle for the NIT. This time, they will likely spend Selection Sunday hoping the NIT wants them.

Virginia Tech is just 15-13 overall and 4-9 in the ACC entering today's visit to No. 5 Duke. The ninth-place Hokies also have a visit to Clemson and a home game with North Carolina State before the ACC Tournament.

The Hokies are hardly a lock for a fifth straight bid to the 32-team NIT.

"I'm just hoping to win as many games as we can win and all that stuff will take care of itself," coach Seth Greenberg said Thursday of the NIT. "I want to get in postseason play.

"I want to make the NCAA tournament - until we get eliminated from the ACC Tournament, that's our goal."

Of course, an NIT bid is a much more realistic goal than becoming ACC Tournament champs. Since the NIT field was reduced to 32 teams for the 2007 tournament, two to three ACC teams have made the field each year.

It's not yet known how many of the 32 NIT bids will be up for grabs because any conference regular-season champ that does not wind up in the NCAAs gets an automatic NIT berth.

But it's safe to say Tech's resume still needs some polishing.

Miami got a bid last year with a 19-14 overall mark and a 6-10 ACC record.

Two years ago, North Carolina State got a bid when it was 19-15, 5-11. That same year, North Carolina got a bid at 16-16, 5-11.

In 2007, N.C. State got a bid at 18-15, 5-11.

The Hokies will need to improve offensively to get a few more wins, though.

In ACC games last year, the Hokies averaged 70.2 points and ranked second in the conference in field-goal percentage (44.4 percent). In ACC play this season, they are averaging just 59.9 points and rank 11th in field-goal percentage (39.5 percent).

In last month's loss at Wake, the Hokies made just three of their first 14 shots from the field. In last month's home loss to Florida State, they made just two of their first 14 shots. In their loss to North Carolina, they missed 14 straight shots during a second-half stretch.

In a Feb. 4 win over Clemson, the Hokies went the final 5:57 without a basket. In a Feb. 9 loss at Miami, the Hokies went a first-half stretch of 6:22 without a point. They were 2-for-15 from the field in the final 14 minutes of last week's loss at FSU.

The Hokies were 1-for-10 from the field in the final 13 minutes of Sunday's 61-59 loss to Virginia, missing nine straight shots in that span.

"We had three bad possessions" in that stretch, Greenberg said. "That was probably a product of being a little young. ... Some possessions, it took us a while to get into what we wanted to do."

Sunday's loss marked the sixth time in the past 14 games that Tech had the chance to tie the score or take the lead in the final seconds. They have won only two of those six games.

This time, Tech inbounded the ball with 17.6 seconds left but didn't get the chance to put up a shot because Dorian Finney-Smith's pass was stolen with two seconds to go.

"The last possession, our spacing wasn't what it needed to be," Greenberg said.

"When you have this young a team, I've spent less [practice] time on special situations because we have so many other things we're doing with them. â? I have not spent as much time on late situations.

"You've got to figure out what's important - to me, [it's] the things that we need to work on to make sure it is close at the end ... I'm choosing to spend my quality time on â? defensive transition and guarding different ball screens and ... those building-block things."

The Hokies seem headed for their worst season since they went just 4-12 in ACC play in 2005-06, the year before they made the NCAAs.

"Losing is not exactly a lot of fun, but it's also sometimes necessary," Greenberg said. "Sometimes you've got to learn to lose before you can win really big."