Will Wade’s Press Conference Before NC State’s Season Opener: TRANSCRIPT (Part 2)

Head Coach Will Wade met with the media yesterday for a press conference leading up to NC State’s season opener on Monday night against North Carolina Central in the Lenovo Center. You can read part 2 of the transcript below.

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You’ve talked about the importance of playing in state teams, but what about being able to also get in state teams that are HBCUs?

I think it’s great to play any of the teams in state. I think it’s good for our fans. If you’re going to ask people to pay to watch us play…you have to fill out a home schedule. You can’t fill out a home schedule with all high majors. Nobody does that. You just can’t do that.

So if we’re going to fill it out, it might as well be teams that we’re familiar with.

I was on campus yesterday. There’s a kid who transferred from UNC-Asheville. I was giving him hell, because he was in the UNC Asheville sweatshirt. He was like, ‘Hey, I transferred here from Asheville.’ I’m like, ‘Well, we didn’t give you a sweatshirt when you came here?’ But he was talking about how he’s looking forward to that game on December 6th. He’s going request his tickets for it as soon as he can, and he’s coming Monday night, too, after I got done talking to him. But he was excited about the game with Asheville. That showed, ‘All right, our scheduling philosophy works.’

Here’s the reality of it. This is how I feel. This is my opinion. This is probably not our athletic department’s opinion. This is my opinion. We’re going to spend the money. We pay these teams. We might as well keep the money in-state. I mean, we might as well help out our people around us. Now, that’s more my philosophy than an overarching athletic department philosophy. They may get mad at me for saying that…well, they get mad at me for saying a lot of stuff.

But my point being is it makes a big impact for Central. They can drive over the day of the game. They don’t have to stay in a hotel. I mean, Mike Jones at UNC-Greensboro…I worked with, he called me. They can drive over, and I’ve been on that side of it.

The last two years, I was playing buy games, and I was on the other side of it, and it’s a pain when you’ve got to bus two hours and fly somewhere. You may get $80,000 for the game, but you spend $35,000 of it traveling. So when you can get 85k, whatever we pay them, and it costs them five grand to come over here, they get to keep more money, too. It’s good for them, and I think it’s good for the state. I think it’s good for the fans.

I don’t see much downside to it. The downside for me, and this is why people don’t do it, is that those teams are fired up to play against us. Like every kid at Central thinks they should be playing at NC State. They’re all going to think that, especially when you have the in-state kids. Central’s got a transfer from Morehead State, he’s from Fayetteville. Those kids are all going to be excited to play against us. They’re going to have an extra edge against us. Okay, that’s the trade-off in the game, but I think the positives far outweigh the negatives. Just kind of my philosophy on that.

How have your analytics from the preseason measured up in practice and the scrimmages?

Yeah, I mean, the metrics have held up pretty well. We measure them only in live play, so we don’t have a bunch of bad data in there, but I mentioned our free-throw shooting. We’re lagging a little bit there. In practice, we’ve been pretty good there, but we’ve been lagging in those two exhibitions, which we’re leaving two points on the table that we’re counting on.

Our three-point shooting’s been a little bit ahead of where we wanted to be. Everything else is what I would consider in the normal range.

Players-wise, exceeding expectations, everybody’s doing about what we thought. I’ve been pleased with what we’ve got. We’re getting out of the guys for the most part.

How geeked are you? Do you still get excited at this point in your careers?

I get excited, I’m excited every day to be the coach. When you do it like we do it, it’s a lifestyle, it’s not a job. This is what we do all day, every day. This is all we think about, this is all we do.

Shoot, I mean, I’m fired up every day for practice, whatever it is. We take a good attitude to it, and most coaches don’t like doing press conferences. I try to show up with the best attitude I can, you know what I’m saying? I mean, I try to show up and have a little fun and answer a few questions.

Everything you do, it’s like, what’s the point of doing it if we’re not going to have a good time with it? But I’m fired up for Monday night, and I’m fired up for practice today. I’m fired up to get into Lenovo and practice today, and I’m excited about tomorrow, and just everything. The whole process is exciting to me, I enjoy that part of it.

However we do today, tomorrow, and Sunday, we’ll show up on Monday, good or bad, or indifferent, that’s how we’ll show up on Monday. But yeah, I’m excited, and our players are excited, and I think our fan base is excited.

Like I said, when we’re all aligned, the reckoning’s here.

You mentioned how the back end of the press led to some open shots against South Carolina, and the half court defense, it looked like that as well. The speed of the way they moved the ball in the half court led to some open shots from three or created open lanes. What do you think led to some of the open shots in the half court defense?

Well, I’ll start with the press. I talked about the back end of the press. We got beat on the back end of the press, but it started on the front end of the press. We had terrible ball pressure. We let them bring the ball up the middle of the court. It started on the front end of the press, and then what you see is the end result, and it looks terrible.

The stuff on the half court starts with the middle drives, it starts with our active hands or non-active hands, and they were whipping the ball. We were behind the play too often. We were behind the play. We were chasing the play instead of dictating the action. Our defense is meant to dictate the action and be aggressive, and we were very, very passive, and I think we’ve been able to correct some of that this week.

We hadn’t been like that a ton in practice, but we didn’t have the edge that we needed to. The way we defend, it’s like a matchup zone, switching man, whatever you want to call it. But if one guy doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do, it’s pretty obvious. It leads to open stuff, and we’ve had a guy or two out there not doing what they’re supposed to do.

We had some lineups out there that we probably wouldn’t play with. We had some of our more inefficient lineups out there just because we were subbing people in, and trying to get some people in.

I told some of them yesterday and today, ‘You’re either going to get this fixed, or you’re just gonna sit. I don’t have time, I’m done playing around. I’ve had time in two scrimmages to kind of see what you can do. Everybody says, just put me in and I’ll show you what I can do. Okay, well, I’ve seen what you can do, all right? I see what you do, all right? So you can either get it corrected, and do it how we want it done, or your ass can sit down. I mean, it’s your decision, I really don’t care. We’ve got other guys that can come in, and we got other guys that can come in and help us.’

What are some of the traits of teams you’ve coached that have won conference championships and NCAA tournament games?

I think every team evolves as the year goes on. If we’re the same in a month, if we’re the same in two months, then that’ll be problematic. So I think those teams all evolve.

The one thing that always happens, whenever you win or you win big, is there’s going to be adversity. There’s going to be a tough moment where everybody’s got to kind of rally, and do what you need to do.

That’s what’s exciting about going to a movie, right? You don’t ever go to a movie for the beginning or the middle. You want to see the end of the movie, right? That’s the most important part of the movie. But there’s usually some stuff in the middle that causes the end to be exciting. But you’ve got to get through that stuff in the middle to get to the end of the movie. Nobody gets their popcorn and leaves after 20 minutes in the movie, right? No, you stay because you know the ending is what’s exciting. So you look back, and it’s easy to look back now that you know the ending, but there’s always going to be some tough spots. There’s always going to be some adversity.

The reason I think this team’s built, is the #1 characteristic we looked for in each player was resilience. We wanted guys who had overcome some adversity to get here. I’ve overcome some adversity to get here. A lot of our other folks have as well. So we wanted guys who were resilient and had overcome some things to get here. That was one of the questions we asked everybody on their visits.

And so by doing that, we’ve already got guys who’ve overcome some things, which makes it more likely we’ll be able to overcome that rough stuff during the year to get to the end and put a good ending on the movie.

Coach Moton is coming here to win…

I think fortunately, that was us, that’s been me the last two years. So I understand their mindset, where they’re coming from, the frame of mind of where they’re coming from. That’s what we were doing the last couple of years. Different, but a little bit the same.

I think the main thing is, the first part is you’ve got to get off to a good start. The longer you give folks hope, and the longer you string things out, the tougher it can be and the tougher things can be. But they’re going to fight like hell. They’re going to be competitive. They’re going to be all over it.

It’ll be a good test for us. Like I said, they’ve got some things they do that are going to cause us problems. He’s going to play some funky zones. He’s going to switch up his defenses. He’s not going to let us get in rhythm.

He’s an excellent, excellent coach. He’s a world class human being and person, but he’s a really, really good coach. He doesn’t get enough credit for the actual coaching part of it, because he’s so involved in the community side of it, but he wins a lot of games at a place that’s not very easy to win a lot of games at. The reason he’s done that is because he knows what the hell he’s doing. He’s a good coach and he’ll be prepared. We know that, and he’ll be ready to go.

Thoughts on being at the 1PACK NIL event with Coach Wes Moore…

First off, I mean, 1PACK does an incredible job. That event was awesome at the Angus Barn. I assume that’s what you’re talking about.

1PACK, Steve, Chris, Reed, all those guys, they are phenomenal. We’re very, very fortunate to have the leadership we have with our collective. And Coach Moore and I, we’re just excited to be a part of it and have a good time with it.

But I hope our fans understand what good leadership we have at the collective. That stuff doesn’t just happen. I mean, one, you’ve got to have good people. I mean, to raise that amount of money, you have to get the right people in the barn, so to speak. You’ve got to get the right people there, and we’ve got incredible supporters, incredible donors.

I’d encourage any of our fans, if you haven’t, look up 1PACK and try to join us, and everything helps, everything helps. It was an incredible night, raised over $800,000.

That’s a huge boost for our program, for Coach Moore’s program. I couldn’t be more appreciative of just the leadership and the work of the collective. We’re very, very fortunate at NC State that we’ve got such good people and good organization with that.

I encourage anybody that’s thinking about it, to help us out, because it helps us win, helps the women compete for national championships. It helps us compete on a national level.

It was just a fun event, it’s cool. Our players had a good time, both teams had a good time. Well put on event, a lot of fun.