Everyone who knows Hubert Davis loves him, very little question about that.
But when you are coach and caretaker of the Carolina men’s basketball team and tradition, that love can be fleeting. And that is where the third-year Tar Heel coach finds himself today, heading into an unprecedented season.
When you consider the circumstances, UNC is coming off the most disappointing campaign in the modern history of the program, as the first preseason No. 1-ranked team to miss the expanded NCAA tournament completely.
Sure, Matt Doherty went 8-20 in 2002, following his first season as head coach in Chapel Hill, when his Tar Heels won 18 straight games, including a win at Duke, and vaulted to No. 1 in the country before splitting their last 10 and meekly exiting the Big Dance in a second-round upset loss to unranked Penn State.
And while the infamous “8-20” was an unmitigated disaster, it was at least partially explainable by the losses of leading scorer Joseph Forte and rebounder Brendan Haywood, both All-ACC players, plus football stars-on-loan Ronald Curry and Julius Peppers who combined to average 12.6 points and 7.4 rebounds. And based on that collapse, Doherty’s 19-13 third team again missed an NCAA at-large bid despite beating Kansas, Stanford, St. John’s, UConn and Duke.
When Roy Williams’ 2010 team was also relegated to the NIT, it came after his second national championship in five years and losing four starters with the names Hansbrough, Lawson, Ellington and Green. His next two teams bounced back to reach NCAA regional finals and made Final Fours in 2016 and ‘17.
All the way back to Dean Smith, the coach Davis played for, the only of his last 31 seasons that the Tar Heels did not make the NCAA tournament was when just one team from the ACC could go. That was four times.
So, as time passes, Davis’ rookie team that beat Duke twice in three weeks and lost a 15-point halftime lead to Kansas in the national championship game looks more like lightning in a bottle, as his third team tries to rebound with two starters and stars back but a remade rest of the roster after losing seven transfers and replacing them with five from the portal.
While his team may not be preseason No. 1 again in 2023-24, Hubert Davis and the UNC program still face pressure around an overhauled roster consistently playing better than last season’s team. (Photo via Todd Melet/97.9 The Hill.)
While super-senior Armando Bacot and senior R.J. Davis are sure things, the rest of the rotation will be decided as preseason practice and early games unfold. And Coach Davis is under the most scrutiny for losing some (if not most) of those transfers due to a lack of playing time — particularly Tyler Nickel, the all-time leading scorer in Virginia high school history who averaged 6.1 minutes and seemed to bust his butt for every second he spent on the court.
The total minutes played by the top seven reserves in 2023 was 1,442, which is an average of about 5 per game. Interestingly, those subbing in for the vaunted “Iron 5” in 2022 accumulated 1,633 minutes or nearly 6 per game.
Whereas Davis has talked repeatedly about his rotation being determined by how many minutes the reserves earn in practice, and he predicted a year ago that his subs would play more, the word “bench” was not used a single time by the head coach in his half-hour summer press conference on Friday. And the attending media did not bother to ask him how much he plans to use his bench this season.
Davis explained away part of the 20-13 record by saying 11 of those losses were “a one possession game with three minutes to go. So we were either up by three or two or tied or down by two or three. And that comes down to discipline and details. Getting a box out here, not turning the ball over there, making a free throw here, making a shot there, setting the screen here. And that’s something that as a team we just gotta do a better job in this upcoming season.”
It is also up to the head coach, how he uses his late timeouts and what plays and defenses he calls for his team to win those close games. In the water-cooler, street-corner and social media banter since last season, fans have echoed one question Davis was asked Friday: “You, personally as a coach: how did you learn and how did you grow from that?”
“I’m always listening and learning,” he said. “Whether as a player or working for ESPN or as an assistant coach… I’ve always felt you can get better and be in a position to learn. I don’t have any specific ways in terms of things that I learned from last year, but I know that I’m a better coach this year compared to last year because I’ve been doing it longer. And the more that you do it, the more you get comfortable, you recognize things that you have done and things that, yeah, I don’t think I like that one. Let’s try this. And so that comes with experience. And that goes a long way when I say I’m in a really good spot.”
While UNC’s roster has time to cement their roles on the team, the bench reserves will look far different from the last two seasons. Seven players departed the program through the transfer portal and only one (Caleb Love) was consistently a starter.
As Davis’ personal popularity remains strong, he is clearly under the watchful eyes of alumni and fans who, at this school, view basketball far differently than any other sport. His new team is made up largely of veteran transfers who did not come to sit on the bench. Who will earn those starting spots and how much will Hubert use his new-found reserves to make the right pass, get that key box out, grab that crucial rebound, make that critical free throw and find that open shot not hoisted up as the 30-second clock is winding down?
Will he change defenses occasionally to keep the opponent off-stride and will he bring back the running game and secondary break, staples of Carolina for decades?
Caleb Love, whose controversial departure was not questioned by the media or addressed by Davis, has become the poster child for all that went wrong last season — dropping from a hero against Duke to a kid who took too many bad shots. But many he had to take to beat the buzzer after the offense had broken down.
It will be a well-watched conundrum for Davis: how he gets five new players, plus a highly regarded reclassified freshman, enough time on the floor to let their experience and talent be factors in reversing a trend that has dogged his program for nine of the 10 months he has been an in-season coach.
Davis did not come into his summer press conference with any edge of urgency, jovially saying how much he loved his new guys as much as he loved his four returnees from last year. He does not seem to feel any pressure, perhaps because he is in the eye of the hurricane swirling around him.
But he has to know that popularity only counts at Carolina if you meet some semblance of a standard set by your Hall of Fame predecessors.
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