BillOfRights
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Hot Stove: UNC Basketball
- Thread starter UNCMSinLS
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stankeylegjones
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Is HD going to be able to sell him on the idea of backing up Caleb?In the portal and has been contacted by Carolina:
Nick Davidson - Nevada Wolf Pack Forward - ESPN
View the profile of Nevada Wolf Pack Forward Nick Davidson on ESPN. Get the latest news, live stats and game highlights.www.espn.com
Nick Davidson College Stats | College Basketball at Sports-Reference.com
Nick Davidson - Stats, Game Logs, Splits, and much morewww.sports-reference.com
6'10", not a rim protector or rebounder, but 37% 3FG% this season, 34% 3FG% career.
BillOfRights
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Or let Lubin, Washington, Wilson, and Davidson battle for time?
stankeylegjones
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At the 4? VAL nor JWash can play the 4.
BillOfRights
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Davidson at the 4 or 5. I don't care. Put those four players in the rotation and see what shakes out.
Lubin can move his feet and guard, and he shot 33% 3FG% at Vandy a year ago. Not saying he's a starter at 4, but could provide minutes. Davidson played the 5 at Nevada. Carolina could play 5 out at times.
Lubin is underappreciated. His block% in ACC games was higher than 7'2 Samet Yigitoglu from SMU, 7'1 Maxime Raynaud from Stanford, 7'0 Efton Reid from Wake, 6'11 Malique Ewin from FSU, and 6'9 Cooper Flagg from dook. Lubin plays big.
This raises another question: Does anyone think the coaching staff already knows who's leaving and who's coming back?
Bigs23
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I’d be happy to see these 2 back as role players.Trimble and Lubin want to return.
Ven-Allen Lubin, Seth Trimble Express Thoughts on Staying at UNC
Both juniors say they want to return next season, while acknowledging the NIL negotiations and roster management discussions set to occur for the Tar Heels.247sports.com
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Nice analysis. My only comeback would be that you should be able to self correct mistakes in this transfer portal/ NIL age . This wasn’t available to us in the earlier eras.
BillOfRights
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I wouldn't think most of the players know yet if they're leaving or staying. Still early. It seems like Trimble and Lubin want to stay. End of season meetings still to come. I expect a lot of conversations between Coach Davis and Jim Tanner. Powell and Jackson have NBA options to explore, I assume Cadeau and Washington will be invited back but may explore options, and I have no clue about Tyson and Brown. Scholarship limit increases to 15, so 4 spots available even if everyone comes back, but I don't know who would want to just to be on the 3rd team.
SnoopRob
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My hunch is that most top 100 recruits are likely focused on basketball as their main concern, so they’ll do what they need to do to try to ensure the best for their careers (overseas for JWash).
I could see a situation where he chooses to stay, but I’d be a bit surprised. I just don’t see him getting much PT next year unless things go terribly wrong in the portal for us and I would imagine he wants consistent time on the court. But, if he decides to stay, I’ll continue to cheer for him.
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The portal and NIL present greater challenges than those that existed 20+ years ago. I think it is now much harder to be consistently successful.
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I was a little stunned how weak JWash played against Ole Miss. He got tossed around like a ragdoll. That kid should be all protein and weight room when he’s not in class or practice.
donbosco
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Have to agree...if it is indeed only about the money for 90% of the players then your campus, reputation, academics...none of the things that Carolina has long had going for it, matter.
stankeylegjones
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I don't think Davidson can play the 5 in HD's offense, and I don't think HD would want him as his big given how this year went, he'd be fitting in at the 4. I don't think there's any way that VAL, or JWash, could play the 4 in HD's offense. Note, JWit hit 10 more threes this year than VAL took while at Vandy, is more comfortable creating his shot off the dribble, a better ball handler, just a better all-around stretch-4. Any lineup replacing JWit with VAL at the 4 would be a worse offensive situation than they had this year. HD needs a 4 whose skill-set is much closer to a 3 than to a 5 - basically an oversized wing, that can shoot (Manek and Ingram, compared to Garcia and Nance).
It will be interesting to see if HD can sell Davidson on coming here to backup Caleb - assuming he's not thinking of Caleb backing him up...if so, that would be a lot of money spent on a backup.
SnoopRob
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I made a similar post elsewhere to this, but I think it's a key thing to realize in the portal era.
The 2 main points of (HS or portal) recruitment are 1) NIL money & 2) NBA Development. If you can't compete, at least as a base level, in those 2 areas then you aren't going to be competitve in recruiting.
But after that comes the "other stuff"...the campus, program history & traditions, academics, etc. And if you can compete well on the NIL/NBA development side, then these can be the reasons that recruits choose you over other programs that can also offer NIL/NBA development.
But while the money aspect is (somewhat) new, let's not pretend that a lot of recruits haven't been about the advantages of how programs will benefit them for a long time. UNC under Dean didn't get top recruits year after year because we have nice uniforms and a good business school. We got players because Dean had a history of putting players in the pros and winning championships. We got good players under Roy (albeit often a different type of player) because Roy made them better players and typically won championships.
NIL has certainly changed the game in terms of making $$$ a main consideration, but it hasn't changed how people operate. Provided we can get our NIL where it needs to be (and can do some work on the perceived NBA development piece), there's no reason UNC can't be at the top of college basketball in the NIL era.
SnoopRob
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I don't think most players "know" what they're doing, but I think most "think they know" what they're doing and have a strong lean at this point. But, for some, there's going to have to be a reality check before they really know what they're going to do.
For Ian & Drake, that's likely getting info from the NBA about where they stand for the upcoming draft. If they're expected to be solidly first round, then I'd imagine they have to take that seriously and go.
For others, I think they have to figure out what their options are if they were to enter the portal vs. staying at Carolina. I imagine that for many, their agents have some idea about that already, especially if they have an offer they like, but for others they're probably weighing an uncertain portal vs. a more known future at Carolina.
But I would guess that most players already have an idea what they're going to do and a preference as to what that will be.
heelinhell
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I would be happy to see them starting next year.
I hope underused James Brown will return, but I worry that he will transfer to a school that has the vision to see the player he will be as a junior...
SnoopRob
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It's interesting to see it all written out like that. Before you laid out the data, I would have said that 2020-2025 was worse, but I don't think the numbers back that up. One thing that makes it hard to compare the 2 eras is that the ACC was much, much tougher in the first period and if you could transport teams between the two, I think the more recent Heels would struggle much more against the 1999-2004 ACC than they have the current one and the 1999-2004 would look a lot better (record-wise) against the recent ACC than they did back in their day.
The other big difference, though, is what you mentioned...at the end of the 2004 season we had a lot more reason for optimism than we seemingly have right now. Roy, one of the top coaches in CBB, had returned to Chapel Hill and we had a team we could be really excited about going into the next season. In 2025, we have a lot more unknowns and uncertainty and that make the future a lot more murky.
But from an achievement standpoint, these two periods are a little closer than I realized and the recent past may be a smidge better than the earlier period.
Bigs23
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if you want the Heels competing for a NT I think they need better than VAL and Seth starting unless the other 3 are stars.
Not many kids wait 3 years to get their shot anymore, but maybe Brown loves UNC.
superrific
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In earlier eras, there were usually freshmen and sophomores to step up when the seniors departed.
In the NIL age, it remains to be seen how well mistakes can be corrected. It is not clear that throwing together a roster of one- or two-year players is an effective team building strategy.