Maria Lysaker-USA TODAY Sports
By Hunt Palmer
Will Wade has been busy.
Between building a staff and overhauling a barren roster, he hasn’t had much time to do media. Local reporters haven’t heard from him formally since his introductory press conference.
Wade broke some of that silence when he spoke with Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports on an episode of Inside College Basketball Now that was released on Tuesday. Rothstein asked Wade about the light numbers on LSU’s roster.
“Well, low volume in terms of what you guys know,” Wade said with a smirk. “That’s right. We’ve got seven or eight guys. So, we’re not too worried. We’ve got we’ve got some good guys.”
To this point, only Kentucky transfer Mohamed Dioubate has publicly committed to the Tigers. Wade has spent time traveling internationally to recruit and told Rothstein that this team would skew toward the international ranks more heavily than high schooler or transfers from other schools around the country.
None of those commitments are public to this point.
“Look, for a bunch of reasons we’re not announcing things,” Wade said. “Some guys are still playing in the playoffs. Some guys, there’s a lot of different things. There’s a lot of different things going on…by the day school starts, we’ll have a real good team, and that’s all that matters. By the end of August, we’ll have a great team.”
Roster building changes by the year in college basketball. Wade was able to use the transfer portal at the end of his first stint in Baton Rouge. Since then, NIL has burst onto the scene. Those rules have been altered, and revenue sharing has become a piece of the puzzle.
Managing the money is a paramount, and Wade felt he made mistakes in Raleigh.
“One thing that we did last year that I made a mistake on was, we basically paid 11 guys when we went out and got 11 guys and had a lot of depth,” Wade said. “And depth’s really important for practice. It’s not as important for games when you’re only playing seven or eight guys, nine max. And so, we had some dead money on the roster which so one thing I’m focusing on here. We’re really going to pay seven or eight guys at LSU this year, and we’ll fill out the back half of the roster with some with some guys who could help us in a pinch.”
It sounds like much of that work is done.
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