Last season’s assistant GM, Patrick Stacy, is expected to be back and a part of the NC State staff this season.
We’ve been holding onto this one for a while now and had been told that this was a likely outcome all the way back on March 25th as Wade was on his way out. There was a group of coaches who weren’t going to follow Wade. We were told that the group was Adam Howard, Brandon Chambers, and Patrick Stacy.
At that point, we were also told that NC State was working to retain Stacy, who produced a ton of value for last year’s Wolfpack (which did not go unnoticed).
If you haven’t been following, Stacy was the brains behind ‘Jam Basketball Intelligence‘ a scouting/analytics service that saw massive success in college basketball prior to him moving into the GM space. His clients were #1 and #2 overall in win % improvement from ’23 to ’24 (McNeese and Green Bay) and had 3 in the top 10 for the largest year-over-year increase in KenPom rank (McNeese, Green Bay, Loyola). They were also working with Houston, which was ranked the best defense in the country.
Stacy is somewhat of a secret weapon. He’s not just a sharp basketball mind. With him, NC State gets a proven proprietary analytics stack that has seen success building rosters all over the country.
Stacy has also worked in Major League Baseball analytics (White Sox) and was the analytics manager for Loyola when they went on their Cinderella run to the Final Four. He jumped into the GM world with Wyoming before taking the job at NC State with Wade.
It’s not confirmed which role Stacy will have this coming year, so we’ll let that play out for now, but it might be worth noting that Stacy was Wade’s initial 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 5-star PGs Rippey and Mingo (he missed on both). Note: Slater was actually fired a week or two prior to Wade’s exit.
Having elite analytics was almost a non-negotiable if you were going to bring in a first-year coach like Justin Gainey. We’re told NC State’s top brass were immediately moving to attempt to retain Stacy, who butted heads (theoretically) with Wade at times last season and had become a favorite inside the NC State administration.
NC State was an analytics darling this season despite a collapse down the stretch (that we now can assume was thanks to Will Wade quitting on his team.)
We’re told Stacy and Gainey met early on, and there was immediate synergy. Right now, the two (along with Riley Collins) are the ones strategizing on the roster and doing initial Zoom calls with potential players.
If you want my opinion, I believe Stacy is the perfect fit for the GM role, where he should have been last year. But nothing right now is finalized. All of that said, his current work with Gainey and the word we’re hearing from inside the program makes it clear that Stacy will play an important role again this season for NC State.
