When Will Wade was hired as NC State’s next men’s basketball coach in the spring, the first call he received was from NC Central’s LeVelle Moton.
Now Wade’s first game with the Wolfpack will be against Moton. NC State tips off the Wade era against NC Central on Nov. 3 at Lenovo Center in Raleigh, the program announced Wednesday. The schools haven’t played since 2013.
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It is one of three non-conference games against in-state opponents that Wade announced Wednesday. NC State will also play UNC Asheville and UNC Greensboro, who like NC Central, are coached by men who Wade has known for a long time and are perennial contenders in their conferences. Wade worked with Asheville coach Mike Morrell and Greensboro coach Mike Jones at VCU.
“Those guys call and want to play, we’re going to play,” Wade said. “And I think it makes sense if we’re going to ask fans to come to Lenovo, ask fans to come to the games, we, at least, need to have teams that they’re familiar with. We try to do that as much as we can within the area.”
The team has officially announced games at the Maui Invitational (Nov. 24-26), at Auburn on Dec. 3 and vs. Kansas on Dec. 13. Wade said Wednesday that the Wolfpack will play Ole Miss in Winston-Salem, Texas Southern at Reynolds Coliseum. He didn’t dispute reports that NC State will play Liberty and VCU, where Wade coached from 2015 to 2017.
“What games have y’all FOIA’d?” Wade said, referencing public records requests.
The schedule was put together with an NCAA Tournament at-large selection in mind.
“You want teams that are going to run up wins within their league as well,” Wade said. “You’re trying to balance local teams and you’re also trying to balance teams that aren’t playing a bunch of ACC schools so that you don’t pull from the same numerics of the NET.”
Wade said he would have loved to have played Ole Miss from the SEC in a home-and-home series. Instead, the teams will meet on neutral sites, hoping that it qualifies as a Quad 1 game — the high quality games that the NCAA Tournament selection committee looks at — both years.
NC State will play Virginia and Wake Forest twice during the ACC season. The Wolfpack won’t play California. NC State will play everyone else, including UNC and Duke, just once. Wade said it appears his team will have seven Quad 1 games in ACC play.
“The league’s only going to give us so much right now,” Wade said. “... We’re the fools if we sit here and complain about this and that. They tell us on the front end who the teams are [that] we’re playing. You could project out how many of those games are going to be Quad 1, Quad 2, Quad 3. All right. Then you know what an average NCAA Tournament resume looks like and how many Quad 1, Quad 2, Quad 3 games they play. Then you just do simple addition and subtraction. The league’s going to get us seven. We need 12. We’ve got to go get five. It’s simple. You got to go do it.”
Wade said the Wolfpack is still looking for another post player or two to add to the roster. NC State lost 6-foot-11 center Paul Mbiya, whose signing was announced in early May, to Kansas. Wade said Mbiya wanted to come to NC State, but "we couldn’t facilitate it happening.”
UNC transfer Ven-Allen Lubin and Wyoming transfer Scottie Ebube, who was added after Mbiya left, are the team’s lone true post players. NC State is using 13 scholarships, but can use 15 under new roster and scholarship limits included in the House settlement.
“Going into a season that thin on the frontline is very, very tough when you’re in a power conference,” Wade said. “Asking those guys to play at a high level for 30-plus nights is tough. … We need to get those guys some help.”