Wade Wins Week One

It feels like Will Wade’s press conference was years ago.

After a two week span of non stop tidbits, leaks, and flight tracking, I was accustomed to getting news every five seconds. It feels like things have dramatically slowed down since Wade's raucous intro last Tuesday.

Don’t let the perceived silence fool you. The Will Wade era in Raleigh is off and running. Good things do take time, but a ton of groundwork has been laid for State to do tremendous things - and faster than you might think.

First Impressions

A press conference is a string of words tied together. No games are played, no work is done. It’s an event literally designed to be successful.

But it didn’t stop Will Wade from blowing it out of the water. For a man who just concluded an emotional chapter at another school and moved across the country with his family the day before, he was certainly prepared.

Wade knew he needed to hit on three things:

• His past, which will be a talking point by the media and opposing fan bases for the near future

• N.C. State fans’ pent up frustration and hunger to win in basketball, especially as a founding member of Tobacco Road

• Getting butts back in seats for Pack basketball, both literally and metaphorically

Well check, check, and check:

“You’re going to get that same passion and competitive fire that I had at LSU without all the arrogance that got me in trouble. I’ve grown and matured since then, and you’re going to get the best version of me here at NC State.”

A good, self aware start. Followed by the line of the presser:

“...It’s going to be a reckoning for the ACC. It’s going to be a reckoning for college basketball, and it’s coming, and it’s coming soon. I want to be very clear. This is not a rebuild. We’re going to be in the top part of the ACC next year, and we’re going to the NCAA tournament.”

Finally, letting fans know early what his expectations are for an N.C. State basketball environment:

“So I challenge everybody who’s watching, all of our fans, our first home game is going to be Monday, November 3rd. I want to sell out the Lenovo Center, 19,500 people. I want 19,500 people in there.”

I don’t need to tell you this, but Wolfpack Nation loved it. Hundreds of people showed up to Reynolds after the press conference for autographs and handshakes with Wade. Pack fans have certainly put their money where their mouths are, too.

Over 700 annual members have joined N.C. State’s ​OnePack​ NIL Collective since March 9th, with annualized memberships totaling over $500,000. That number doesn’t include one time donations made on top, and whatever larger donors have done in the background.

This number can - and should - get much higher, but to see a 40+ percent jump in memberships points to tangible buy-in from the fans. (Highly recommend checking out the collective and getting involved ​here​.)

Saying exciting words on day one is just the start. The real work begins with getting the right people and systems in place to rebuild.

Assembling a Staff

Wade came to Raleigh having captured the national spotlight. He’d already made a name for himself by winning big at LSU, but engineering a March Madness story for the ages in McNeese - and then being super transparent on his N.C. State interest - gave Wade even more air time in the weeks leading up to his hire. Hey, we love the free publicity.

With all the attention trained on him, lots of folks are lining up to join him on his staff. He’s spoken glowingly about his McNeese staff, but with his connections and national reach, he can dip into a much wider pool of candidates.

Yesterday we got official updates on two assistants long connected to joining Wade in Raleigh: Adam Howard, from Nebraska, and Brandon Chambers, who coached with Wade at McNeese.

Howard’s GoPack announcement highlights that he’ll be focused on running the offense, while Chambers will man the defensive side of things.

For the other three spots, it sounds like a combination of the following guys:

• Shawn Forrest - Long tenured assistant, who coached with Wade at McNeese and held the Assistant to the Head Coach role at Memphis with Penny Hardaway

• Vern Hamilton - McNeese’s head of player development who also held the same role with Wade at LSU, all time leader in steals as a player at Clemson.

• Tevon Saddler - current Head Coach at Nichols State. A guy Wade faced in the Southland and praised him as one of the top young coaches in the country. Was the youngest head coach in Division 1 Basketball this year at 30 years old, former player.

• Levi Watkins - one of Kevin Keatts’ best assistants, Levi had a heavy hand in several recruiting and player development wins, including guys like Jarkel Joiner and D.J. Burns

• Ryan Bernardi - a true wild card option. Bernardi is the Head Coach and Director of Prolific Prep, a basketball academy known for churning out elite level talent, like Darryn Peterson (#2 overall player in this year’s class.) It’d be a major add to the recruiting arsenal of this staff, but is that necessary with the connections already at State’s disposal?

  
  

My favorite thing about this list of candidates is that all of them have a “fastball” - if it’s elite recruiting connections, playing experience, x’s and o’s expertise - they don’t appear to be token additions to the staff that we’ve seen from past regimes.

I would personally love to see Hamilton, Saddler, and Bernardi, but I trust Wade to get the right guys to compensate his strengths (recruiting, being a “CEO”, offense) - this is going to be a high quality staff that you’re going to like having in Raleigh.

What I absolutely love is what he’s done with his “front office.”

As a newer development of the NIL and portal era, the General Manager role means different things at different schools. For this staff, it appears to be someone focused on maximizing roster value, tapping into personal connections and networks for access to the right recruits, and leveraging analytics for scouting and game prep purposes.

All Wade did was go out and get one of the most connected basketball minds there is in Andrew Slater. Slater keeps a low profile, but has one of the most intriguing backgrounds a college GM can have.

Slater is coming from noted NBA analytics stalwart Oklahoma City. Previous to his time in the league, he spent time as a national high school basketball recruiting analyst. He’s got an incredible eye for talent and a rolodex of connections that few can compete with.

This will likely be one of, if not the best, GM hires made in college basketball this year. Folks “in the know” have described it as almost as impactful as the hiring of Wade himself.

This tweet sums up what State is getting in Slater pretty nicely:

The great hires didn’t stop here.

Patrick Stacy is another analytics guru that was inside Reynolds for Wade’s presser. His journey into the world of basketball is even more interesting - Stacy started out messing around with advanced stats as a student at Loyola-Chicago because he wanted to be a Baseball GM. After a serendipitous connection with the basketball staff, Stacy offered to do a scouting report ahead of their next game.

That turned into helping Loyola on their Final Four run, and eventually the creation of Jam Basketball Intelligence, Stacy’s company that would eventually land clients like Kansas in game planning and analysis. Neither of these hires have been announced yet due to university formalities, but they are in Raleigh working already.

These additions scream that Wade understands the game is changing. These are modern positions filled with the most qualified people.

The right structure for this program is coming to Raleigh. Now the question turns to who they’ll be coaching.

Portal Work

This is the most exciting aspect of a new coach coming into portal season, but there haven’t been major developments on the recruiting front so far.

Don’t mistake a lack of news for a lack of work being done.

This staff has kept recruiting development news completely locked down. We aren’t hearing the normal amount of intel from the N.C. State side, hell, we're not hearing any thing at all really. The only concrete lead we’ve gotten is a photograph of the back of a recruit’s head at Flying Biscuit Cafe:

This was not Eliot Cadeau - who committed to Michigan yesterday - and turned out to be Matthew Able, an uncommitted Shooting Guard hovering just inside the top 25 in this year’s class.

If not for this quick snap from a local Flying Biscuit fan, we wouldn’t have any concrete evidence of visits or recruiting work by the staff. That’s not a bad thing. The fact that this staff is keeping information tight to the vest speaks to a group that is operationally sound and serious about what they’re doing.

We’ve seen State pop up on a number of recruits’ lists this week. At this point, it's difficult to tell who is seriously interested in State and who is listing names of schools for the heck of it.

Two seemingly obvious adds from McNeese would be guards Alyn Breed and Quadir Copeland. Both have Power 4 experience, are older, and know what Wade expects - and Wade knows what to expect of them.

They're no longer listed on McNeese's roster, and I'd expect those announcements sooner than later.

There seems to be some panic for some that State hasn’t gotten anyone to commit yet. At the time of me writing this, only 4/17 ACC schools have landed a portal commitment. Only one or two of the commits appear to be impactful.

N.C. State just paired Will Wade with Andrew Slater, upped its NIL pool significantly, and has playing time and a 2024 Final Four to sell. There are hundreds on hundreds of players in the portal. Patience is a virtue for a reason.

Overall, this is a hell of a first seven days. Wade immediately connected with the fan base, hired several incredible pieces on and off the court, and is hard at work putting together a roster that should have State in the tournament next year.

If there’s one thing I’m taking away about everything we know from week one, it’s that N.C. State is serious about competing. That’s not something we’ve been able to say with certainty in quite a while.