RALEIGH, N.C. — There was still plenty of time on the clock when Steve Forbes walked almost the length of the Wake Forest bench slapping hands. The Demon Deacons were in the middle of a 16-0 run to close out their first win over N.C. State in three seasons, and it was less about celebrating that Wednesday night than Wake Forest’s first 20-win season since 2010.
Wake Forest suddenly has a lot to celebrate. After Forbes’ first fitful season at Wake Forest, it’s been an instantaneous turnaround in the second. His quick-fix approach has fixed Wake Forest, and quickly. The Demon Deacons are back to where the school and its fans have always believed they should be, and on track for their second NCAA tournament appearance since that 2010 season, four coaches ago.
“Respect is a hard thing to get back once you lose it,” Forbes said after Wednesday’s 69-51 win. “We’re starting to gain back the respect Wake Forest once had in this league, where we belong. But we’re not satisfied. Twenty wins is a good season. Twenty-five or 30 is special.”
Wake Forest hasn’t won more than 24 games since 2005. It’d be a shock if the Deacons don’t get there before they leave Brooklyn next month.
“There’s a lot of first times this year, not only for myself but for the team,” said guard Daivien Williamson, a Winston-Salem native who followed Forbes to Wake Forest from East Tennessee State. “It feels good.”
A team built for 2022
Wake Forest is very much a team for college basketball in 2022, built not through recruiting and developing players but plucking them off the shelf in the talent Wal-Mart that is the transfer portal. Only Isaiah Mucius is left from Danny Manning’s ill-fated regime that only ended 22 months ago.
The rest of the roster has been built on the fly since Forbes arrived in Winston-Salem, with a few freshmen but mostly transfers and junior-college players and in some cases both. That’s the case of Williams, by far Wake Forest’s best player and a potential ACC Player of the Year candidate, who started out at a junior college and played two very vanilla years at Oklahoma that did nothing to hint at the explosiveness within.
Jake LaRavia started out at Indiana State. Dallas Walton came from Colorado. Kadeem Sy went from Virginia Tech to junior college to Mississippi to Wake Forest. Williamson and Damari Monsanto followed Forbes from East Tennessee State.
“They’ve done a good job identifying guys in the transfer portal who really fit their system,” N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts said. “You go out in the transfer portal, sometimes you hit the jackpot, sometimes you don’t. They hit the jackpot.
“It could be different for them next year. You lose some of those guys and you replace them with other transfers, maybe they don’t work out as much. When you have transfers, that’s great. But if they leave you may not be able to replace them with the same caliber of player. If you ask that question about this year, it looks like he’s done a great job there – and I think he has.”
Keatts didn’t go on to say, but he could have, that he’s taken a different approach. The Wolfpack did add Casey Morsell from Virginia and the injured Greg Gantt from Providence out of the portal, and has tried for others, but its roster is built around sophomore Dereon Seabron and freshman Terquavion Smith, both capable of greatness in flashes and more consistently in the future, but still raw and unpolished now.
Get old and stay old
That’s the traditional way to do it, to get talented players and help them become ACC stars, or at the least contributors, the way Manny Bates became the ACC’s best defensive player and Seabron went from anonymous freshman to dominating sophomore. (Cam Hayes, who showed so much promise as a freshman last season, has sadly gone the other way.)
Get old and stay old, as the saying goes. Mike Brey has gone through a few cycles of that at Notre Dame, and his got-old-and-stayed-old team is currently in sole possession of first place in the ACC. It’s the way Keatts did it as an assistant coach at Louisville and for the most part as the head coach at UNC Wilmington, the way it’s always been done most everywhere. His tenure at N.C. State has been hamstrung by the threat of NCAA sanctions, now lifted, and the premature departure of two none-and-done recruits, but that still doesn’t add up to a grim 3-11 record in the ACC.
The answer to the captain–obvious question, why can’t State be like Wake, is that State isn’t trying to be like Wake. It’s taking the approach that has always led to the most consistent long-term rewards in college basketball, or once did. Experience is mean but efficient.
But it’s also an open question whether that still works in 2022, in the transfer-portal era, with a new generation of players and – even more important – a new generation of parents. Not just at N.C. State but everywhere, it’s tough to keep a roster together long enough to see the benefits at the end.
That’s the great gamble for N.C. State: That players like Seabron and Smith, who have gone through all this pain, all these narrow defeats like Wednesday, will still be here to reap the benefits of it down the road. In the past, that would have been a given. In today’s environment, no one really knows.
It’s a different gamble at Wake Forest, that Forbes can slap a roster together with string and duct tape and chewing gum and make it look like it wasn’t. That a player like Williams can become the star he hadn’t been previously. That players who thrived in the Southern Conference can thrive in the ACC – a more common occurrence nowadays than it ever was before.
Fred Hoiberg was doing this at Iowa State when no one else was but now almost everyone is to some degree, even if few have to the degree Forbes has in his two seasons at Wake Forest. There’s no magic sauce to it, other than Forbes himself.
Chemistry, concocted and created
When you’re bringing players in from all over and recruiting them via Zoom, a team doesn’t form by itself, and there are all kinds of ways Forbes has tried to build chemistry, from rotating who the players sit with at meals to movie nights at his house across the street from campus. He self-deprecatingly admits he’s not the greatest Xs-and-Os coach; he’s from the love-’em-up school of coaching, and if you’re building a team from scratch every summer, you probably have to be.
“We went and played Airsoft. You guys tried to kill me once,” Forbes said.
“Almost did,” Williamson said.
Haven’t yet. Wherever these Deacons came from, however they got here, they’ve found a way to make it look like they’ve been playing together for years. Wake Forest has found a way to recapture past glory, fleeting though it may yet prove to be. N.C. State is still trying, hoping to profit, at some point, from all this pain.
