In the modern NIL era, building a roster from the ground up that’s capable of making a deep March run isn’t just possible; it’s increasingly realistic.
Justin Gainey, NC State’s new head basketball coach, is going to be tasked with doing that starting on April 7th when the transfer portal opens. You’re going to see a ton of people giving their opinion on who the Wolfpack should bring in. They are going to share their points per game and how many rebounds they had at another school, in another conference, and it will have you wondering if this is a good fit for NC State. But that will be a fleeting thought, and you’ll go about your day.
Inside the walls of the Dail Center, people’s jobs depend on answering those questions.
Before we get into how I believe NC State will attack this, I want you to take a second and ask yourself…
“How would I go about this if my job depended on it?”
There are obviously a lot of ways to answer that question, but for me, I would study winners.
I would try to understand if there were any threads or patterns I could find between highly successful programs. What did they have that we don’t, and what can we learn from them?
Last year, there was a prevailing narrative that NC State had a poorly constructed roster. Sure, NC State didn’t have the perfect roster, but they also didn’t have the NIL budget to create the perfect roster. Last year, it was estimated that NC State had around a $10M budget in NIL. Was that narrative warranted?
For context, here is what is floating around about potential NIL budgets from this year’s NCAA Tournament.
That’s just looking at the Sweet 16. There are a lot of schools that had budgets in the $15M range that didn’t advance this far. We’ve heard ACC schools like Louisville, Virginia, and UNC all had more than NC State and are obviously not listed here.
If I had to guess, I’d assume NC State was in the Top 35 nationally. In fact, I do know that the metrics they had last year projected them to make the tournament and win a game (ie, finish in the Top 32).
When you understand that, you start to see that constructing a roster with limitations isn’t easy. There are tons of questions.
Do you spend big for 2 elite guys and have that take up about half of your budget, and penny-pinch the rest? Or do you spread it out and have a more balanced team with 1 elite scorer?
Either way, you get to a point where you need to evaluate players that could potentially have been underutilized, in the wrong system, or simply just weren’t ready to make a jump up.
This gets complicated, and it’s why, in this day and age, you need a very competent and very experienced analytics team or GM.
Last year NC State had that in assistant GM Patrick Stacy, who was the mind behind JAM Basketball Analytics before jumping into the GM ranks two years ago at Wyoming. We did an entire story on this at the beginning of last season.
In fact, it’s rumored that Stacy was initially Wade’s choice for GM before Andrew Slater was hired at the last minute (presumibly for his recruiting connections overseas and in NY). In the end, it was Stacy who ended up doing almost all of the GM work internally while Slater was constantly on the road trying to land studs like 5-star PGs Rippey and Mingo (he missed on both). Note: Slater was actually fired a week or two prior to Wade’s exit.
It’s very (very, very 😉) likely that NC State will retain Stacy this season, and in my opinion, that was almost a non-negotiable if you were going to bring in a first-year coach like Justin Gainey. NC State’s top brass were well aware of the value he brought and made it a priority to try to bring him back in after he refused to follow Wade to LSU.
Now, I’m sure some of you are reading this with a skeptical eye, unable to shake the notion that while NC State was a metrics darling, they really didn’t pass the eye test all season long.
I’m well aware of this, and during the season, there were a lot of questions about our reliance on analytics. Heck, NC State AD Boo Corrigan even seemed to take a jab in that direction during Justin Gainey’s introductory press conference, saying…
“In an era of analytics, Coach Gainey’s teams will be built on the basics. We’ll score the ball. We’ll defend at a high level. We will rebound. We will dive for loose balls. We will show toughness every step of the way.”
And look, I get having that notion last year. The whole ‘deep analytics’ thing was new to NC State, and as a fanbase, we were operating on the assumption that Will Wade was a great coach.
But the more I learn about what went on last season, the more the veil gets lifted, and I start to see that the narrative was only partly correct. Wade was extremely invested in being an analytics-driven coach, but it has become clear as we’ve investigated that’s where it ended for Wade. He’s not some supreme X’s and O’s guy. In fact, it seems like he outsourced his entire operation.
Let me explain.
I believe hiring and listening to subject matter experts is smart. Understanding that people know more than you is a very important part of being a great leader. But that can’t be it. You have to have your own vision, and that vision needs to be built on a set of values that you hold dear and that you live by. That part needs to be the actual foundation of your program.
This is where I think NC State is making a great hire with Justin Gainey.
Gainey, from all reports, is very invested in analytics. But for Gainey, those analytics aren’t the end-all, be-all. They’re there to hone and refine a vision, strategy, and mentality that he’s held his entire career. Justin Gainey knows the game of basketball; he knows how to lead people, and I believe his core strategy, mixed with deep metrics, is what will unlock great things for NC State.
And before you go thinking this is a puff-piece that’s throwing shade on Wade and hyping our new coach. I want you to take a look at this breakdown by Arkansas Quant, a college basketball strategist who studied Final Four teams from the past 3 seasons.
We then overlaid NC State’s roster from last year to see where they fit …
Believe it or not, NC State was an elite BPM (Box Plus/Minus) player and a competent defense away from being one of those elites.
So why did they drop so many games down the stretch? Why did they only squeak into the tournament? Why did they fall apart despite having so many pieces?
The answer, in my mind, was Will Wade’s leadership and coaching. I’ve interviewed people these past two weeks and dug through the metrics. Wade was making decisions last season that were not analytically based. He was playing guys more than the metrics were suggesting. Couple that with the fact that he checked out completely in February, and it becomes even more clear.
NC State got where they got despite Will Wade.
This season, they’ll have the same recipe, a budget for even better ingredients…
… and a new chef who I think can put it all together and cook up something very exciting in Raleigh.
