Will Wade’s Press Conference Before NC State’s Season Opener: TRANSCRIPT (Part 1)

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 1 of the transcript below.

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We’re excited to get started. This is what we work for, is to get to the first game.

So, we’re very, very excited and looking forward to the opportunity on Monday night. We’ve got a lot of stuff to get fixed from our exhibitions. Certainly, most of you guys were at the South Carolina exhibition, but the other one, most people didn’t see.

The back end of our press has got to get better. Teams have been exploiting that. South Carolina was able to exploit that. So, that’s been a huge point of emphasis, is getting our pressure better, and being a little bit more solid defensively in the half court.

We’ve been averaging giving up 11 middle drives a game in both of those scrimmages. That number needs to be closer to six or seven. We’re going to give up some middle just by the way we play, but, that number needs to be four or five less than that. Eleven is going to be a hard way to live all year, and put too much stress on our defense if we’re doing that.

We’re going to need to do a good job Monday night of guarding without fouling. They were Top-30 in the country last year in free throw rate. Each of the last five years, they’ve been Top-100. So we’ve got to do a good job guarding them and staying in front without fouling.

Scoring on them will be tough. About one in every five possessions, they’re going to play zone. They play a 2-3, a 1-3-1, a triangle and two, a box and one. They’ve got all sorts of different zones, all sorts of different things. They also play pressure man. They’re going to press us. It’ll be important for us to hang on to the ball.

We haven’t been very good assist/turnover wise either. I’ve been pretty disappointed with that. Overall, our assist/turnover ratio in the two exhibitions is one to one, 26 assists, 26 turnovers. Our problem is really our bench. Our bench had two assists and 11 turnovers. That’s certainly problematic. Each of the last six years, they’ve been Top-100 in the country in forced turnover rate. So, if we can’t handle the ball better against that, it’s going to be an issue. So, that’s something that’s going to be important going into Monday night. Been disappointed.

We’re leaving points at the free-throw line as well. Been tracking as a 75% free-throw shooting team. We’re shooting 66% in the two scrimmages. We’re leaving 1.8 in roundabouts, probably two points a game. We’re leaving two points a game on the table, which we’re going to need those two points. You know, 77% of conference games are three possessions or less. So, you’re going to need two points. We can’t be leaving points at the free-throw line.

We’re not going to get a ton of threes off against them. They do a great job guarding the three-point line. They’re Top-50. Coach Moton does a great job. He’s been Top-50 in the country in three-point field goal percentage defense 11 times. They just don’t let you get them off. They do a great job there.

We have to get on the offensive glass, get the ball in the paint, and be able to finish at the rim. So, those will be some big challenges for us.

They’ve got good personnel. They’ve got their point guard #2 back, averaged about four assists a game. (Dionte) Johnson, good player. They shot 59% from two and 39% from three on his assists. That shows he’s getting deep in the paint and getting them good looks.

They’ve got two 40-plus percent three-point shooters in (Gage) Lattimore and (Khalil) Arnold, #3. Those guys can really shoot it. They’ve got good personnel.

They’ve got a kid, (Jae) Slack, I’m familiar with. He was at Northwestern State, which was in the league with us at McNeese. He went to West Virginia State, averaged, I think, 18 and 5 at West Virginia State.

So, they’ve got good personnel. They play hard. They’ll play a bunch of different things. They’ll cause some challenges for us on Monday night. Hopefully, we’ve improved and gotten better since last Sunday.

Do you have any sense of what it’s going to be like on Monday night in the Lenovo Center?

No, I don’t, because I haven’t been here at State. But, I’m excited. We’re practicing over in Lenovo this afternoon. We’ve been over there last week for a little bit, and you look up and you see all those seats, and you go, ‘Dang, all these are going to be full for the first game.’ So, I’m excited to see what it’s about. I don’t think that I have ever been a part of an opener where there’ll be 19,000, 20,000 people.

I think that’s what makes NC State great. That’s what makes our fan base great. That’s what makes our program great, is that we’re going to put 19,500 in there on a Monday night at 7 o’clock. Just very, very thankful and very, very appreciative of the fans who are going to show up. I think it should be a fun environment.

Coach Chris Lee from WRAL as well.

Your relationship with Coach Moton…

Oh, yeah. I’ve known him a long, long time. We were actually at a breakfast together probably two weeks ago, but I’ve known Coach since he was a high school coach. I was at VCU at the time. We’ve stayed in touch and talked.

When I got the job, he was one of the first people to call me. He’s done a phenomenal job with the program at (North Carolina) Central. He had a run there where they were just running the MEAC.

The NIL area has been a little bit different, but he always figures it out.

As you said, he’s got deep ties in the community. He grew up here. He grew up around basketball in this area. He’s a phenomenal coach. He’s a phenomenal person. Phenomenal mentor. He was obviously a great player at Central as well.

But I’ve known him a long time. Our relationship goes back a long, long time. Looking forward to competing against him on Monday night.

We have a lot of mutual friends. I’ve had some friends of mine who have worked for him as assistants, and all sorts of different things. He’s a great guy, great coach.

They force a ton of turnovers. His stuff is very consistent over time. Top-100 in turnover force rate six straight years. If you’re not consistent with that, you’re not ranked 11 times in the Top-50 in three-point field goal percentage defense. That stuff’s consistency. That’s being a great coach. That stuff translates wherever you are.

How deep do you expect your team to go? What’s a realistic rotation for you?

We played nine the other day. A realistic rotation is probably nine right now. I’d like to trim that down to eight, but we’re not at that point yet. So, nine’s where we’re going to be at on Monday night.

We’ve seen some social media posts with the noise meter and traditions that you guys are trying to bring back. How important was it for you to kind of lean into the history of the program?

I’m not sure what all of this I can comment on. I don’t know what’s out there and what’s not.

I think it’s important for our fans. I think it’s important to connect with our fans. Look, we have an incredible tradition. We have an incredible history of basketball here. So I don’t I don’t know why we would just throw that stuff to the wayside. That stuff’s worked for a long time and for whatever reason, we’ve gotten away from that. Maybe that’s why our program has gotten away from being a consistent winner.

So I think that you win for a reason and you lose for a reason. If there was stuff that we were doing when we were winning for a reason, I don’t understand why we would necessarily stop doing that.

Reed Vial from my staff has done a great job with it. I told him, ‘We’ve got to go learn this place. We’ve got to understand what this place is. We’ve got to know about this.’

We’ve had players from every era speak to our team. We’ve got one speaking today before practice. We want our guys to have an appreciation for that. We have an appreciation for that. Reed hears from the fans. He shows me. Whether they’re older folks, that’s what they remember when they were younger. Whether they’re younger folks, that’s what they grew up with, and so I don’t know why we wouldn’t tap into that if that was something that was exciting for them, and something that was a fond memory for them. They can create those same memories now that they’re older, or for their kids. So we certainly want to tap into our past with those traditions. I mean, I want to play like those teams. That’s the most important part.

What are your overall thoughts through the first month? Do you like the foundation you’ve built here so far?

I mean, you always want more as a coach. You always want more from the guys, but I think we’re built on a solid foundation. I think we’re built well. We’ll see how that plays out over the first couple of weeks here of the season, but I feel comfortable with where we are right now.

You’ve got a couple games on film that you’ve shown the team. What’s the response been like from them, showing them what they need to work on?

After the Appalachian State game, I think after our first scrimmage, in their minds the scrimmage went very well. In my mind, I was not all that pleased with the scrimmage, and I came in here and I went berserk, and let everybody know what I thought, and that I didn’t think this was very good, and our standards weren’t met. This was very colorful, but that seemed to fall on deaf ears, because they’re just results oriented, not process oriented, so we had a lull where we didn’t practice very well.

I thought we were kind of stuck in neutral. We had been moving up the mountain for a while, but we were stuck in neutral. We kind of plateaued a little bit, and I thought that South Carolina…South Carolina is a good team. I thought Sunday they were way more receptive to my messaging this week than they were after that first one.

There’s things where we’ve got to grow as a team. We’ve got to have some folks that grow up and understand that just because we won, it doesn’t mean we don’t have problems. Some people are just so excited about winning that they can’t see the issues. We don’t want to win. We want to dominate. If you want to dominate, you’ve got to dominate with your discipline. You’ve got to have obsessive attention to detail…obsessive attention to detail. Anybody that has excellence has obsessive attention to detail. So we’re playing against standards, not necessarily a scoreboard. I think they covered our board back there, but the standards we have to reach every game, we didn’t do that in the first game. and I was not happy about that, and they got up here, and they were like ‘Oh yeah, we won coach. Yeah, whatever.’ So, we’re getting better.

They were much more receptive this week to my messaging. The same issues that South Carolina exploited, we had in the first one. We just didn’t have the urgency and the edge to get them fixed like we needed to. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah we’ll fix them…we’ll fix them,’ then when you get exposed like that, like we did against South Carolina, we got a little more urgency and edge to us, so hopefully Monday night you’ll see the team that I think we’re capable of being, or closer to the team we’re capable of being