Siena has rarely been in a better spot, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.
The Saints won the Metro Conference Tournament in March, punched their first NCAA Tournament ticket since 2010, and pushed Duke to the brink before falling 71-65 in a hard-fought first-round game. Then, almost immediately, the guy who built it walked out the door. Gerry McNamara left for his alma mater, Syracuse, and Siena was left trying to replace the best thing that had happened to the program in over a decade at the exact moment it had the whole state’s attention.
That’s a brutal spot for any mid-major. While Siena has been a model program in its conference, momentum in college basketball (especially for non-mjaors) doesn’t wait around. Fans who latched onto your program during a run to the NCAA Tournament need a reason to stay engaged, and “we hired someone new” isn’t usually that reason on its own. Players who may have been enticed to join your program now have second thoughts.
Enter Nevada Smith, and enter a very deliberate answer to the momentum problem: speed.
Smith, hired away from Shaka Smart’s staff at Marquette, isn’t trying to replicate what McNamara built. He’s betting Siena can hang onto its new fans by giving them a completely different, faster, louder brand of basketball. At his introductory press conference, he described his vision in two words that have already become the unofficial theme of his tenure: “organized chaos.” Heavy three-point volume, an up-and-down pace, spacing designed to get shooters open looks in transition before a defense can set.
Smith made the same pitch again this past week, speaking at a court rehab dedication ceremony and ice cream social for the Siena men’s and women’s programs at St. Anne Institute. His message was as much about ambition as it was about style.
“We can really score,” Smith told the crowd. “They do it with ease. It’s the hardest thing in basketball. They do it very easily. If we defend, we’ve got a chance to have a really special year and do some things that might never have been done here before.”
That last part isn’t a throwaway line. Siena has never advanced to the Sweet 16 in program history. Smith isn’t just selling entertaining basketball, he’s explicitly tying the up-tempo offense to a shot at the deepest NCAA Tournament run this program has ever made, conditional on a defense that’s still very much a work in progress.
“Offensively, we’re pretty good at our flow and what we’re trying to accomplish,” Smith said. “If we played a game tomorrow, we’d look organized. Defensively, we haven’t done a lot. We do so many individual workouts; there’s not a ton of defensive stuff. I feel like we’re ahead. I like where we are.”
The roster is being built to match the vision. Siena returns four scholarship players from last year’s tournament team, including one starter, graduate forward Brendan Coyle of Niskayuna. Smith brought in a full recruiting class of eight, five of them international, headlined by Division II national champion transfer Pace Prosser, who averaged 18.6 points a game at Gannon and is currently in USA Basketball’s selection pool for the FIBA 3×3 U23 World Cup.
Summer work wrapped two weeks ago, followed by another week of individual workouts, and Smith came away encouraged by more than just the Xs and Os.
“It was terrific,” Smith said. “We did a great job of growing on and off the floor, trusting each other, being together, building relationships, which is what the summer is about. We got better, we got bigger, we got stronger. We got better at basketball. But we really got to know each other. Got to build some bonds that we’re going to need when we’re in some wars.”
That’s the real test of whether fun basketball can actually replace a beloved coach. Fans who fell for Siena during last year’s Cinderella run don’t need nostalgia. They need a reason to keep watching. Smith’s bet is that organized chaos, played fast enough and shot well enough, and eventually backed by a defense that hasn’t been built yet, is exactly that reason.
