247Sports Embed Resource
TALLAHASSEE – Luke Loucks began the process of building his first squad before he was hired as Florida State's head basketball coach.
The former FSU starter and decade-long NBA assistant is leaning on his professional ties to figure out the best attainable personnel in assembling a roster in need of turnover. That doesn't necessarily mean a huge roster churn is coming for Loucks as he will be in Charlotte this week to watch the team in-person as a "fly on the wall" for the ACC Tournament in what could be the final games under long-time coach Leonard Hamilton, Loucks' former coach and one of his career mentors.
Yet the need to use the Portal in Year 1, it's a must for Loucks. He understands this. It's an area of the evolving college game that Hamilton admits he was too slow to adjust to a few years back, and Loucks emphasized during his introductory press conference on Monday that his goal to finish out the season with the Sacramento Kings was impossible because of the pending Portal period in the coming weeks.
"'Guys, if I don't get here and get going, I'm going to pay for it the next 12 months,'" Loucks told Kings brass.
Loucks has utilized his connections already to get a jump start at the scouting process for the upcoming transfer cycle.
That means talking to a network of coaches, scouts and agents throughout his now-former organization and the NBA to get a sense of who will be available.
"Through this process, you'd be an idiot to not starting using your resources at the NBA level," Loucks said. "...Through that, you mesh this huge list and condense it down and if they hit the Portal, I'm going look at, give a strong look at and have staff do intel on. Because you have such a small window. As soon as that Portal hits, if you're not three days ahead of that, you're in trouble."
This approach to the Portal falls in-line with what feels like an important note of Loucks' methodology as a first-time head coach.
Call it analytic-driven. Call it Moneyball-esq. Call it whatever, but Loucks does seem to have a grasp that FSU's ability to acquire the most expensive talent out there – whether it's in the Portal or on the prep scene – will be limited relative to some of college basketball's bluebloods.
"The upper echelon of college, I'm just not going to go after those kids," he said.
His ultimate approach will be to recruit his home state of Florida as well as possible at the high-school level, retain the evaluations that he and his staff hit on, and supplement through international and Portal ranks.
It won't be dissimilar to the cap-driven NBA that Loucks spent the last 10 years in. He was part of the staff for the 2017 championship Golden State Warriors, which was guided by home-grown stars Stephen Curry, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green while getting supplementary superstar Kevin Durant via free agency. When you nail the initial evaluation, you can afford to splurge in attaining extra pieces (and no, they usually won't be at KD level).
Yet that'll be amplified in his first job at the college level.
"You have to be much more resourceful with how you do things," Loucks said.
So scouting and development, that's where Loucks knows he'll have to find an edge in a sport where his program will often be at a resource disadvantage compared to others in FSU's league.
"That is my skill, player development, that is my skill with connections throughout the NBA. I'm going to build a staff with strong connections," Loucks said. "We are going to develop you to make way more money than what you'll make with us or anywhere else."
Getting ahead on the Portal scouting process is a good start.