Just as we all expected, the 2016 NC State basketball recruiting class will go down as one of the nation’s best. It is deep and indeed most plentiful in talent, as again, we all expected. Knew it the whole time. None of us were ever concerned about this.

Here are the updated class rankings from 247Sports:

Duke Kentucky Arizona Michigan State NC State UCLA Texas Virginia UConn Mississippi State

NC State is one of six schools with multiple five-star commitments. Duke, Kentucky, and Arizona each have at least four five-star players committed, because ugh. Curse their excellence.

This is a tremendous accomplishment for the Wolfpack given the way the offseason started, and given how absolutely necessary it was for State to add players with 2017-18 in mind. The 2016-17 edition of the Pack is going to be deep, but it’s going to leave a lot of holes to fill the year following, too. Mark Gottfried’s staff has done about as well as they could to address that problem in this class. The 2017 class will be pivotal as well.

Being able to sell playing time is one thing, and it does help considerably. Being able to sell that playing time when it’s a year away is another thing altogether, and this is where the coaching staff deserves major credit. We’ve got some highly-regarded freshmen coming in who could get more minutes right away in a lot of different places, but they’re coming here, where they are likely to end up in reserve roles in year one.

It’s a significant leap of faith in college basketball nowadays. Can it work? Sure. Will it? We’re gonna find out.