Person familiar with the deal: Wake Forest tabs Colorado’s Bzdelik as new basketball coach

AP source: Wake to name Buffs’ Bzdelik coach

RALEIGH, N.C. — Wake Forest has selected Colorado’s Jeff Bzdelik as the Demon Deacons’ new men’s basketball coach, a person familiar with the deal said Tuesday.

Bzdelik has been in Winston-Salem since Monday, the person told The Associated Press, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the formal announcement had not been made.

The school has a 10 a.m. ET news conference scheduled for Wednesday to introduce its new coach.

Bzdelik spent 2½ seasons coaching the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and most recently went 36-58 in three seasons at Colorado.

His expected hiring comes a week after Wake Forest fired Dino Gaudio because of what athletic director Ron Wellman described as a pattern of late-season fades.

Wake Forest focused its search on Bzdelik for most of the week that the job was open. Over the weekend, he emerged as the only publicly known candidate, and he issued a statement Sunday acknowledging that he would speak to school officials about the opening. His old boss, Colorado AD Mike Bohn, said he was monitoring the Demon Deacons’ pursuit of his coach “on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, actually.”

Bohn made that statement Monday while Bzdelik was flying with Wellman to central North Carolina, and the coach spent the past two days on campus for formal interviews.

The 57-year-old Bzdelik is no stranger to either his new boss or his new employer; his daughter is enrolled at Wake Forest. Bzdelik and Wellman have known each other for roughly three decades, since they were at Northwestern in the early 1980s — Wellman as the baseball coach and Bzdelik as a men’s basketball assistant.

Bzdelik started his coaching career in the late 1970s at Davidson, an hour’s drive south of the Wake Forest campus.

Wake Forest will be paying a pair of men’s basketball coaches this season. Gaudio was fired a week ago, and six months after his contract was extended through 2013-14. In discussing the firing, Wellman said the buyout clause in the ex-coach’s deal “will be honored, most definitely.” Terms were not disclosed.

Gaudio had a three-year record of 61-31 but a combined mark of 1-5 in ACC and NCAA tournament games. His dismissal came 15 months after he guided the Demon Deacons to just the second No. 1 national ranking in school history — and 2½ weeks after a 30-point loss to Kentucky in the second round of the East Regional. The Demon Deacons have won multiple NCAA tournament games only once since 1996.

Bzdelik signed a five-year deal at Colorado in 2007, and leaves less than a month after the school broke ground on a practice facility. He comes with a $500,000 buyout in his contract to coach the Buffaloes.

His 15-16 record this past season was an improvement; Colorado lost 22 games in 2008-09 and 20 the year before that.

He has not been to the postseason since taking Air Force to the semifinals of the 2007 NIT. That season, those Falcons gave Wake Forest its most lopsided nonconference loss of the modern era when it routed Skip Prosser’s Demon Deacons 94-58 in November 2006.

Bzdelik is 0-1 as a head coach in the NCAA tournament, with his Air Force team losing to Illinois in the first round in 2006. He was 50-16 in two seasons at the academy, and was 73-119 with the Nuggets from 2002-04.

Now he’s expected to take over a program with a reputation for attracting NBA-caliber players. Guard Jeff Teague and forward James Johnson jumped to the pros last year after their sophomore seasons, and Al-Farouq Aminu announced plans to leave early two weeks ago.

Among the new coach’s next challenges: Keeping an incoming five-man recruiting class considered one of the nation’s best by the recruiting services, and ingratiating himself with the unsigned high school seniors-to-be who will make up the class of 2011.

AP Sports Writer Pat Graham in Denver contributed to this report.