RALEIGH, N.C. – Justin Gainey returned home last month when he was hired to replace Will Wade as NC State’s new coach. Once he got settled in, the former Wolfpack point guard put a high priority on getting his alma mater’s best player to do the same.
His success at convincing shooting guard Paul McNeil Jr. to withdraw from the transfer portal and remain with the program was more than just a win for Gainey’s effort to build a winning team in his first season as a head coach. It was also an important statement about his ability as a recruiter and the passion he has for NC State.
“He’s one of ours,” Gainey said of the 6-foot-5 junior, adding that it’s “a big deal” to bring back one of the ACC’s most improved players last season. “He’s an NC State guy, so that made it all the more important to keep one of ours home.”
Retaining McNeil didn’t just help Gainey gain a foothold toward his goal of keeping the best players from North Carolina in North Carolina. It also satisfied one of the other important aspects of his roster building philosophy.
Shooting ability.
When it comes to putting the ball in the basket from long range, no one in the ACC was better from beyond the three-point arc than McNeil. He made a league-leading 42.7 percent of his attempts (105 of 246) and set a school record by making 11 three-pointers in a game against Texas Southern while averaging 13.8 points for the season.
While McNeil will undoubtedly be the first offensive option for the Wolfpack as he continues to expand his game and bolster his NBA resume, he won’t have to carry the shooting load by himself. That’s because his third coach in as many seasons at State as already surrounded him with plenty of backcourt help.
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Three of the first six transfer commitments he’s landed – Maryland’s Darius Adams, Hofstra’s Preston Edmead and Santa Clara’s Christian Hammond – are guards while a fourth, 6-foot-7 RJ Keene from Boise State, is also capable of playing the position. Adams (10.8 points), Edmead (16.1) and Hammond (15.6) all averaged in double figures in 2025-26 while Keene, who Gainey described as a Glue Guy, shot a respectable 34.5 percent from three-point range despite being better known for his defense.
“We put a priority on shooting and as you can see, I think we did a good job of addressing that across the board,” Gainey said during an interview session on Thursday.
The next step in the building process is bulking up a frontcourt whose lack of depth proved to be the Wolfpack’s undoing in its only season under Wade. He’s already picked up two transfers, 6-foot-10 big man Kyle Evans from UC Irvine and 6-foot-8 forward Eemeli Yalaho from Washington State, to go along with 6-foot-9 holdover Zymicah Wilkins, who redshirted a year ago while shedding 30 pounds from his original 260-pound frame.
While Gainey said it’s too early to tell exactly how his new roster will fit together and what style of play will best suit it, his core philosophy centers around a fast-paced, aggressive attack with a high priority on defense.
“We’ll play to our personnel,” the former assistant to Rick Barnes at Tennessee said. “We’ll get a better feel for guys’ strengths and weaknesses, but philosophically I want to play with pace. I want to be aggressive. I want to impose our will, don’t sit back and wait to be attacked. A lot of that will be determined on how quickly the guys pick things up and how well they mesh.”
At least some insight into how the Wolfpack might look under Gainey can be gained from his staff hires.
He brought in Anthony Goins from Georgia, where he helped the Bulldogs make back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances while ranking fifth nationally in scoring at 89.4 points per game a year ago. Alvin Brooks III, meanwhile, earned a reputation for his defensive prowess during his eight-year tenure at Baylor before moving on to become Mark Pope’s associate head coach at Kentucky.
“From an offensive standpoint, I kind of started thinking about who were some of the tougher teams to guard that I played against, and Georgia was one of those teams,” Gainey said. “I liked how they played. I liked the spacing. I liked the pace they played at. So I’d always kind of put it in the back of my head, that when I become a head coach, offensively, from a philosophical standpoint, I wanted to kind of look like that. When this opportunity happened, I didn’t know if I’d be able to get (Goins), but obviously he came over and I was so excited to have him.
“Then with Coach Brooks … he’s a great defensive mind and coming from Baylor, where they did a few different things, particularly the zone that they ran was really effective during that (national) championship run. That’s something that we want to look to implement into what we do.”
Gainey developed relationships with both new assistants during their time together in the SEC. They’re the kind of relationships he hopes to build with his new players. That’s not always easy these days. With unlimited transfers and the lure of NIL windfalls, some players barely stay long in one place long enough for fans to know their names.
Gainey, however, hopes to buck that trend. All of the players currently on NC State’s roster have multiple seasons of eligibility remaining.
“I’m not just trying to build a team every year,” he said. “I’m trying to build a program of people that feel the same way about NC State that I do and I think to get to that, you’re going to need some guys that have the opportunity to be here for multiple years…The most important thing is that they all fit. So as I look at those five, six guys that have multiple years left, it fits well with the idea of trying to start off building that program.”
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