Wright State’s Nagy breaks down how summer went for his program

“I was talking to an assistant at UCLA,” Nagy said, “and he said they didn’t have any summer workouts all last year. They came back in September because that’s when school starts there, and then they go to the Final Four, so they’re trying to figure out how advantageous is the summer. I don’t know. I think primarily it gives our players a place to work out and do the things they want to do. It allows us to have stuff in so that when we start practice, our practices don’t have to be as long because we’re not doing a bunch of new drills and putting things in that are already in. I think from that standpoint, for us, it helps us to cut practice time down so that we don’t have to burn our guys out.”

Nagy lets his assistant coaches do a lot of the work with the players in the summer so they aren’t hearing his voice too much. There will be plenty of time for Nagy to make his voice heard when preseason practices begin. Then the start of the 2021-22 season won’t be far behind.

Nagy enters his sixth season at Wright State with a 109-49 record. The Raiders, who finished 18-6 last season and won the Horizon League regular-season championship, are poised to be a top contender in the conference once again. Nagy spoke about what he saw this summer from the returners and newcomers in an interview with the Dayton Daily News on Monday.

Q: This is going to be a different team without Loudon Love, who chose to start his pro career in Europe rather than returning to take advantage of an extra year of eligibility. Did you know most of the summer he wasn’t coming back?

A: We went through all summer with that thought. We just had that mindset. That’s what we prepared for.

Q: How will the team be different without him.? You do return a number of other key players with a lot of experience, but they might be playing a different role without him in the lineup.

A: It remains to be seen, but a guy like Grant Basile, probably his development has been held back a little bit because of Loudon and us not going through Grant. A couple years ago, Loudon broke his arm for about a month and Grant turned out to be really a heck of a good player for us. Then, of course, we bring Loudon back and then Grant doesn’t have the same number of opportunities. We think he could really explode this year and be the kind of player we think he could have been all along. We know statistically we were better with Loudon off the floor in terms of offense. We were better offensively when went Loudon wasn’t on the floor. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but statistically that is the case. I think we were bigger and it was hard to score around the basket with Loudon and Grant in there. Offensively, we could probably be the same. Defensively, it may impact us. There’ll be other people that step up and take bigger roles. I think everybody’s prepared for that.

Q: You’ve got four newcomers: two transfers (Riley Voss and CJ Wilbourn) and two freshmen (Keaton Norris and AJ Braun). Can you give me a quick scouting report on what you learned on each of them this summer?

A: Riley can play several positions and just is kind of like a quarterback on the floor — a point forward, I would call him. Very good shooter. Really good passer. Good understanding of the game. High IQ. So we thought he was really a good addition for us and can play the three and four.

CJ Wilbourn gives us some size we lost with Loudon. Defensively, he’s very physical. Great kid. Smart kid. Plays really hard. We felt like he was a really good addition.

Then our two freshmen, we’re to that point now where it just remains to be seen whether our freshmen can help us because we’ve been here long enough where the recruiting cycles have worked through and our best players are older kids. They both had great summers.

Keaton had a great summer. We feel like there’s an opportunity for him to play for us and for us to play him and Trey (Calvin) together. We’d be smaller at the guards at the one and two, but Keaton is a tough kid and can give us good leadership. And then AJ Braun, we thought had a great summer. He was super productive. We (keep stats) in all our workouts, and it was just incredible how productive he was.

I think they’re going to put pressure on us to make some tough decisions in terms how much they’ll play, whether or not to redshirt them, all those kind of things. But we feel like if they can help us they are going to play.

Q: As far as the returning players, is there anyone who stands out as someone who could be the most improved player on the team?

A: Of all the guys, Trey has to make a big jump for us, and I think he did this summer. He got stronger. He’s playing with more confidence. Trey started all the games for us last year, so it’s not like it’s a surprise. But we wanted him to become more efficient offensively, and we think that’s going to happen. We know Tanner (Holden) is going to have a great year and Grant will have a great year. I think just like any other team it’s important that you stay healthy. That’s why I think it’s important that we were able to cut practice time down to keep our guys healthy. There’s two other guys who didn’t play a lot for us last year — Alex Huibregtse and Andrew Welage — who were freshmen last year and really return as freshmen this year, and we expect both those guys to get more minutes for us this year.

Q: You added two new names to your coaching staff: Dan Beré and Travis Trice. Do you like how your staff looks?

A: We feel like they’re great decisions for us and fit what we do, what’s important to us. The players have really enjoyed them. It’s nice because you get some new ideas. I’ve had our staff together for so long sometimes you can get a little stale in terms of your ideas. Plus, it lights a little bit of a fire under me, too. I get so dependent on my staff that sometimes I let them do too much. This forces me to get a little bit more involved and get back in there, which is probably good for me. Those two guys were really good hires for sure.

Q: Promoting Clint Sargent to associate head coach, was that an easy decision?

A: Clint’s been with me for a long time. Played for me. I trust him implicitly. So that’s a very simple decision.

Q: You announced a nine-game non-conference schedule last week. It includes road games at Purdue, N.C. State and Marshall. Do you like the schedule?

A: There’s no question it’s the toughest schedule I’ve ever had as a coach, for sure. We felt like it’s time to really challenge ourselves and push ourselves. We’re doing it for sure. We’ll see how it plays out, but we feel like we have a team that can compete in all those games.