To reflect on the year, Chapelboro.com is re-publishing some of the top stories that impacted and defined our community’s experience in 2023. These stories and topics affected Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the rest of our region.
Hopes were very high for the UNC men’s basketball team entering the 2022-23 season. Four starters from the previous season’s “Iron 5” national runners-up – Caleb Love, R.J. Davis, Leaky Black and Armando Bacot – were all returning to school. Second-year head coach Hubert Davis was ushering in another talented batch of freshmen and had plucked former Northwestern standout Pete Nance from the transfer portal. The Tar Heels were seen as a championship favorite, and the AP ranked them No. 1 in its preseason poll. Then it all went wrong.
From the start, something just seemed off.
Games top-ranked Carolina was supposed to dominate were remaining uncomfortably close. The Tar Heels still won, but not by convincing margins. They beat UNC-Wilmington by 13. They beat College of Charleston by 16 (after trailing at halftime). They scraped by Gardner-Webb by six. They fought past Portland by eight.
Almost by default, UNC remained No. 1. But college basketball fans were beginning to see the emperor, in fact, had no clothes.
That’s when the losing started. Iowa State and Alabama dealt Carolina back-to-back excruciating losses in the Phil Knight Invitational. Indiana and Virginia Tech simply outclassed the Tar Heels in tough road environments. Four straight losses sent UNC tumbling completely out of the AP Top 25, an unprecedented fall from grace for a preseason No. 1. No team has ever made such a mess of it in so little time.
Still, by late January it appeared the situation in Chapel Hill had stabilized. Carolina won 10 of its next 12 games following the four-game skid and entered the month of February at 15-6 overall and 7-3 in ACC play, more than good enough to secure a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
Then, disaster. UNC lost five of its next six games, including losses at home to Pittsburgh and on the road at Duke in which the Tar Heels led late in the second half. Miami, which would reach the Final Four later that spring, controlled a visit to the Smith Center to win by eight, and NC State used a second-half rally to add insult to injury in Raleigh. Carolina was now firmly on the wrong side of the NCAA bubble.
A loss at NC State in February was UNC’s fifth in six games. (Image via Associated Press/Chris Seward)
A home loss to Duke in the regular-season finale (again, in which the Tar Heels led in the second half) and a loss to Virginia in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals sealed it: Carolina would miss the NCAA Tournament entirely, becoming the first preseason No. 1 to miss the tournament since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985. Officially, it was UNC’s first time missing the tournament since 2010 (the 2020 tournament, which Carolina would have missed, was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic).
“Looking from the outside in [at the NCAA Tournament] this year, it’s tough,” said R.J. Davis, whose strong junior season served as one of the team’s bright spots. “It’s been like that the whole year: just attention to details, little things that we just need to perfect and that we didn’t.”
The disappointing end to the season turned downright bizarre when the Tar Heels chose to decline a bid to the National Invitational Tournament (NIT), a decision which divided the fanbase. Some saw Carolina as being sore losers for not wanting to play in the tournament. Others believed the team was so mentally checked-out that any additional games simply wouldn’t have been worth the trouble.
“Although… this season wasn’t what we had hoped for, I want to thank our players and staff for their hard work and love for Carolina Basketball,” read a statement from Hubert Davis. “Many factors go into postseason play and we believe now is the time to focus on moving ahead, preparing for next season and the opportunity to again compete for ACC and NCAA championships.”
Nearly every Tar Heel had suffered a regression from the previous season’s form. Caleb Love, who’d played the hero in UNC’s run to the 2022 national championship, saw his three-point shooting dip from 36 percent as a sophomore to just under 30 as a junior. Armando Bacot struggled with injuries throughout the season and was not able to replicate his dominant 2022; his scoring and rebounding numbers both decreased in 2023. Pete Nance, the coveted transfer, shot just 32 percent on threes after posting a 45 percent mark in his final season at Northwestern. The loss of Brady Manek, whose hot outside shooting had jump-started the Carolina offense the year before, loomed large.
Pete Nance struggled in his only season as a Tar Heel. (Image via Todd Melet)
Once the season ended, the transfer portal opened, and the downtrodden Tar Heels began to turn their lonely eyes to greener pastures. Carolina fans braced for an exodus, and they received one: reserves D’Marco Dunn, Dontrez Styles, Puff Johnson (younger brother of former UNC star Cam), Tyler Nickel, Justin McKoy and Will Shaver all left the program.
Then came the most noteworthy exit: Love. The former five-star recruit who’d become one of the faces of the program would leave Chapel Hill for good. When counting the losses of Nance and Leaky Black, who had both exhausted their collegiate eligibility, nine Tar Heels in total left the team following the end of the season. Only four scholarship players – Bacot, R.J. Davis and reserves Jalen Washington and Seth Trimble – would stick around.
Hubert Davis was faced with the monumental task of building a roster nearly from scratch via the transfer portal and incoming freshmen. And though the 2023-24 season has gotten off to a solid start, his Tar Heels have a long way to go in washing the sour taste of last season completely away.
Featured image via Todd Melet
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