The Nevada men’s basketball season concluded last Thursday, marking the eighth Wolf Pack team to complete its 2024-25 season. At the end of the year for each Nevada sport, we will provide a final report card. Here is the Wolf Pack men’s basketball report card.
Nevada men’s basketball
Preseason expectations: The Wolf Pack was coming off back-to-back NCAA Tournament berths and lost all-conference guards Jarod Lucas and Kenan Blackshear to graduation. But Nevada returned three starters from the previous season and added what appeared to be an enviable transfer class, so expectations remained high. The Wolf Pack was picked to finish third in the Mountain West preseason poll, with the team hoping to win its first conference championship under coach Steve Alford.
Final recording: 17-16, 8-12 MW (seventh place out of 11 teams)
Player of the Year: Nick Davidson — Davidson was voted to the preseason All-MW team and backed that up with the best season of his Wolf Pack career. The junior forward finished first or second on the team in points (521), rebounds (153), assists (92), blocks (39) and steals (27) while making 50 percent of his shots, including 37.1 percent from three. Davidson was voted to the All-MW Second Team after the season and ranked 70th in Bart Torvik’s player of the year rankings. That was the good news. The bad news is Davidson enters transfer portal and will spend his senior season elsewhere after three solid years as an active Wolf Pack player.
Statistic to note: 1-10 — Nevada went 1-10 against NCAA Tournament teams, 0-11 against top five MW teams, 4-19 against opponents over .500, and 3-13 in Quad 1 or 2 games, which are four statistics to highlight the fact that Nevada simply couldn’t get over the hump against quality competition. All of them are damning, with perhaps the most damning being that 0-11 stat against the top half of the conference. Many of those games were close losses as Nevada went 4-8 in games decided by six points or fewer/overtime with a KenPom odds ranking of 353rd out of 364 Division I teams (12th worst). But the inability to beat good teams isn’t just down to bad luck. The Wolf Pack just couldn’t finish games against better competition.
Best win: Beat VCU, 64-61, Nov. 22 — This win over an NCAA Tournament team came early in the season against VCU as the Wolf Pack overcame a 15-point second-half deficit thanks to 21 second-half free throws. Nevada was down three points before Tré Coleman’s tying trio with 54 seconds remaining. After the Wolf Pack got a stop, Kobe Sanders hit the game-winning three with 5 seconds left. Davidson had a team-high 15, with Sanders adding 10 and Coleman and Brandon Love nine each. This victory was the second of three matches in the Charleston Classic. Nevada beat Oklahoma State two days later to improve to 6-1. It was 11-15 afterward as VCU finished the season 28-6 while earning the 11th seed in the NCAA tournament.
The season in brief: The Wolf Pack got off to a fantastic start and played like a fringe Top 25 team through its first seven games, which included wins over Washington, Santa Clara, VCU and Oklahoma State with the only loss being a two-point loss to Vanderbilt, an NCAA tournament team. But something happened after the Charleston Classic, because Nevada was never the same after that tournament. The Wolf Pack’s shooting went haywire as Nevada ranked second in the nation in non-league 3-point shooting at 41.9 percent, but shot just 30.1 percent from three against MW competition. Nevada started the league 0-4 and never recovered, sweeping games against Air Force (KenPom 311), Fresno State (260) and San Jose State (169) while beating UNLV once (94). Any hopes of a late-season surge were defused by a series of injuries that prematurely ended the careers of seniors Coleman (hand), Daniel Foster (ankle) and KJ Hymes (back).
Final score: C — You could certainly argue for a drop because Nevada didn’t live up to expectations, but the Wolf Pack finished 79th in NET and 81st in KenPom, which are 78th percentile numbers (and the third best in Alford’s six seasons). The first seven games improve the rating a bit, but the MW season has been a slog with almost no positive developments. Looking ahead, Nevada will lose all six players who started at least 10 games this season, so this is a major rebuild from a micro perspective. On a macro scale, three of the four coaches who preceded Alford – Trent Johnson, Mark Fox and Eric Musselman – won multiple conference titles and multiple NCAA Tournament games in their first five seasons at Nevada. Alford finished six years without a conference title or an NCAA Tournament victory, going 3-7 in the postseason and going 7-13 in the magical month of March, compared to 106-61 from November-February. There has been some success, with back-to-back NCAA Tournament berths in 2023-24, but it’s not what Nevada expected when luring Alford to Reno with a record 10-year contract in April 2019. The good news is that Alford’s teams have generally bounced back from poor seasons with bids to the NCAA Tournament the following year. This is the objective in 2025-26.
Nevada Men’s Basketball Report Card
Sports columnist Chris Murray provides insight into Northern Nevada sports. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @ByChrisMurray.
