Hubert Davis Catch-all

[superrific]

I still don’t call that leaving Doherty a shit sandwich. By that logic, you could argue that Dean left Gut a shit sandwich based on everyone who left the team after the 1998 season. But Gut did a pretty good job— outside of the NCAAT— with that “shit sandwich” that was the 1999 team.

Gut left Doherty plenty of talent, experience, and a well-rounded roster. What happened after that is more on Doherty. He likely drove off Forte and Curry (I do agree that Peppers would have focused on football his junior year). It was Doherty’s job to put together the incoming freshman class for the 2001-02 season. And Gut did sort of give him an assist in that class (or at least attempted to), which didn’t pan out through no fault of any coach, in bringing in Jason Parker, who was expected to join UNC after a year at Fork Union.

But any way you look at it, even if that 2002 team was low on talent by Tar Heel basketball standards, it still shouldn’t have been an 8-20 season with what the team had. Doherty made his own shit sandwich.

The 1999 team had Ed Cota. If Matt Doherty had Ed Cota, we would not have been 8-20, not close. Would we have been, you know, good? Probably not. But not remotely 8-20.

I don't know how you can say it was more on Doherty when recruiting back then was a two year in advance sort of thing. Gut recruited Doh's freshman class: Boone, Morrison, Fing.

There were a string of recruiting misses in the mid to late 90s that contributed to the talent deficit. It started under Dean. Stick, Owens, Brooker -- I don't know what it was with those buys. Stick was actually pretty good as a sophomore, IIRC, and then stopped working or caring. Guess he didn't like basketball too much. Evtimov was a talented player who got screwed by the NCAA and then UNC admissions. Jason Parker was a two time fiasco. Terence Newby and Melendez should never have been offered, and the Melendez offer was especially bad because it indirectly cost us Jayson Williams.

 

[thebruinbleedstarheelblue]

I actually believe that NIL has made talent less evenly distributed than it was in prior years. Those mid-majors don’t have the NIL funds that the high majors do and the high majors are taking the mid-major teams’ best players. Mid-majors used to succeed by holding onto their players for four years and putting experienced teams on the court. They can’t do that anymore.

we should be winning this era... it's really not fair!

 

[superrific]

They weren't playing vs '05... the team was probably a little bit well-rounded in Illinois was more talented than the other team teams as well.

The problem with Hubert is that he hasn't come close to that success again. Roy did it again.

For those that say that Hubert is still learning... I'm concerned that his most inexperienced year was the best.

I don't understand your first sentence. What do you mean?

Obviously HD doesn't have the full track record that Roy had before or since. Not every comment has to be interpreted for its effect on the ultimate question. I'm just saying, and I don't think there is much debate, that Roy inherited a firmer foundation for success than either Matt or HD.

Roy had already taken a job with not much foundation -- Kansas lost all their talent after the 1986 season and were on probation. And Roy had them in the Final Four like three years later. So obviously he did it once, and he likely would have done it again. That's not the question.

 

[finesse]

Brooker who was a great high school shooter had a really bad knee injury in the summer before he got here. I think his speed was a little suspect before that. Similar to what happened with Curtis Hunter but Hunter was a lot more talented to start.

 

[SnoopRob]

His social media posts are the ravings of a mad man. I don't think he had the temperament to be a successful college coach no matter when he started

He's certainly gone off the deep end after his coaching career, but that could be that he thinks he got a bum deal from the coaching community and is now angry at everyone and everything because of it. (And some of it could be performative in the age of Trump.)

But I agree that the bulk of the evidence suggests that he wouldn't have been a great coach even if Carolina hadn't come calling so soon in his HC career.

 

[SnoopRob]

I suspect that his time at UNC made him quite bitter. We saw that bitterness on display a few times in Roy's late tenure, IIRC. Adding bitterness to his personality was always going to be a problem.

I think the temper tantrums he had at Carolina and the bitterness of his post-Carolina/coaching career are manifestations of the same personality problem, a lack of willingness to accept responsibility for negative outcomes/issues and instead aggressively blaming others for said outcomes/issues.

In short, his bitterness is long-term, metastasized version of the lack of personal accountability he showed in the short-term while in CH.

 

[superrific]

That team lost to Hampton, Davidson, Charleston, and Ohio...none of those teams were more talented than we were.

I think that team with a strengths-based coach who focused on the positives could have been a .500 squad, but that was probably roughly its ceiling.

Instead we had a coach who routinely tore players down and focused on the negative and that team largely fell apart down the stretch that year.

The real miracle of that season is that we beat Clemson in CH that year (handily, even) in our last home game. It would have been easy for that team to have packed it in by that point, but they kept the streak going.

No they weren't more talented. But as I said, the problem with 8-20 was the distribution of talent. I think no PG in the history of Carolina basketball spent more time dribbling laterally than Adam Boone. That is, when he wasn't dribbling with his back to the basket at half court. And Morrison just couldn't play in control. He was an ADHD player -- no attentiveness on defense, no patience on offense, just a guy who chased the highlight play every single time.

You can't run offense if you can't get the ball past the hashmarks or if you turn it over every third time you do.

 

[SnoopRob]

that was a culture breakdown.

Can you expand on this?

I mean, I think you're correct, but just saying that alone doesn't really explain much.

 

[BillOfRights]

I think the window will largely be the window until either HD gets a whole lot better or the AD decides to act to move on. HD is an alum and the hand-picked successor of the previous, very successful, coach. it's always going to be painful to relieve him of his position whether that's after a run of terrible seasons or after merely decent ones. The operative question is when the AD feels the pain of moving on is less than the pain of keeping him.

If HD is back, and unless we are a lot more successful, then next year is likely going to be worse from a disgruntled fan perspective. From a program perspective, this season has been - in many ways - the worst case scenario, no real success but just enough that each side of the divide feels further justified in their stance.

Did you write "no real success" after Carolina beat top-5 dook, top-10 Kansas, and won AT Kentucky, and AT Virginia?

 

[superrific]

I think the temper tantrums he had at Carolina and the bitterness of his post-Carolina/coaching career are manifestations of the same personality problem, a lack of willingness to accept responsibility for negative outcomes/issues and instead aggressively blaming others for said outcomes/issues.

In short, his bitterness is long-term, metastasized version of the lack of personal accountability he showed in the short-term while in CH.

Well, I haven't the insight to judge his personality problems, or his habit of blaming others. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I don't know.

Odds are that you are right. If I had to bet on "whether Doh could have been successful at UNC with more time to mature," I'd need pretty good odds to bet the affirmative case. However, "would Doh have gone 8-20 had he a couple of more years of seasoning?" Maybe not. Maybe he would have squeaked 10-11 wins out of that team (and if Forte really might have stayed, which I doubt, then the team would have been much better).

 

[Icky Mettle]

I don't know. He had some decent success after UNC. Emphasis on decent, but he did win some games with some poor programs.

I suspect that his time at UNC made him quite bitter. We saw that bitterness on display a few times in Roy's late tenure, IIRC. Adding bitterness to his personality was always going to be a problem.

I don’t think you could call anything in his post-UNC career a decent success. In the seven years of coaching after UNC, he put together two winning seasons: 15-13 during his one season at Florida Atlantic and 20-15 during his fifth year at SMU. Apart from those two seasons, his post-UNC season records were 14-17, 10-20, 9-21, 15-17, and 13-19. Only one post season appearance and that was in the CIT (CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament).

 

[SnoopRob]

No they weren't more talented. But as I said, the problem with 8-20 was the distribution of talent. I think no PG in the history of Carolina basketball spent more time dribbling laterally than Adam Boone. That is, when he wasn't dribbling with his back to the basket at half court. And Morrison just couldn't play in control. He was an ADHD player -- no attentiveness on defense, no patience on offense, just a guy who chased the highlight play every single time.

You can't run offense if you can't get the ball past the hashmarks or if you turn it over every third time you do.

If you think that Carolina wasn't more talented than those four teams then we have no basis for continued discussion as our respective understandings of the team are simply so disconnected as to be incompatible.

 

[SnoopRob]

Did you write "no real success" after Carolina beat top-5 dook, top-10 Kansas, and won AT Kentucky, and AT Virginia?

I did.

Real success isn't winning a particular game, it's winning titles and hanging banners. This team, even before Caleb's injury, wasn't really in the running for that at either the conference or national level.

 

[superrific]

Felton had a career average eFG of 45.9%. Love right now is at 48.6% - purely as a scorer, he is, mathematically, having a more efficient season than Felton ever did. He's 10th on the NBA rookie ladder and was higher before his minutes got squeezed by guys returning from injury. Assists are a non sequitur because Love's not playing on the ball. Perhaps you're right about Love's NBA future, but that would remain true if he was putting up Felton numbers -- the only difference between the two is draft pick equity.

Oh, bullshit. You're comparing career average to a single season? Felton had several years of 48,49%. And you can't say "assists are a non-sequitur." First, plenty of guys who play off the ball get assists in today's NBA, but more to the point: Felton was valuable BECAUSE HE COULD PLAY ON THE BALL. He was a PG.

Your argument is that because Caleb is slightly better than Felton (which itself is a bogus and inaccurate premise) at one thing, he's better overall even though he is demonstrably worse at many other things. That makes no sense at all. It's like saying, well Wemby's blocked shots don't matter if you're comparing him to SGA because SGA isn't a shot blocker. Bullshit.

 

[superrific]

If you think that Carolina wasn't more talented than those four teams then we have no basis for continued discussion as our respective understandings of the team are simply so disconnected as to be incompatible.

no, I meant that those other teams weren't more talented. UNC had a higher overall talent level, for sure. But when the talent is badly distributed, the overall talent level doesn't mean as much.

If you're saying that we shouldn't have lost those four games, sure. But I'll bet any coach would have lost at least one, especially since the games were early in the season and our guards had no experience in addition to their other flaws.

 

[superrific]

I don’t think you could call anything in his post-UNC career a decent success. In the seven years of coaching after UNC, he put together two winning seasons: 15-13 during his one season at Florida Atlantic and 20-15 during his fifth year at SMU. Apart from those two seasons, his post-UNC season records were 14-17, 10-20, 9-21, 15-17, and 13-19. Only one post season appearance and that was in the CIT (CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament).

OK. It was a long time ago and I confess that I think about Matt Doherty infrequently. I think the season at FAU was a reasonable success -- a big improvement over where they had been, but I could be wrong about that and don't care enough to look it up. I guess I remember the 20 win season at SMU, and not the others probably because I would have no reason to hear about bad teams in different conferences far away.

 

[Icky Mettle]

The 1999 team had Ed Cota. If Matt Doherty had Ed Cota, we would not have been 8-20, not close. Would we have been, you know, good? Probably not. But not remotely 8-20.

I don't know how you can say it was more on Doherty when recruiting back then was a two year in advance sort of thing. Gut recruited Doh's freshman class: Boone, Morrison, Fing.

There were a string of recruiting misses in the mid to late 90s that contributed to the talent deficit. It started under Dean. Stick, Owens, Brooker -- I don't know what it was with those buys. Stick was actually pretty good as a sophomore, IIRC, and then stopped working or caring. Guess he didn't like basketball too much. Evtimov was a talented player who got screwed by the NCAA and then UNC admissions. Jason Parker was a two time fiasco. Terence Newby and Melendez should never have been offered, and the Melendez offer was especially bad because it indirectly cost us Jayson Williams.

My point about Doherty’s recruiting was that it was up to him to recruit the high school class of 2001 (the class that would be his first recruiting class) when he took over in the spring of 2000. To be fair to Doherty, however, it’s more of a challenge to recruit your first year in the program because you’re pretty much starting anew later in the game, whereas the previous coach had been working on guys for a while. But any new coach has to deal with that; it’s not a matter of the previous coach putting him in a bad position.

 

[BillOfRights]

...but I think the Hubert decision is based on what we've seen... and whether or not we think he's improving.

I think the decision to change head coaches should be based on what we've seen... and how confident we are that we can get someone significantly better.

Is this a job where we want to give someone 7 years to become who we want?

Being that the coach in question is Hubert Davis, if we think he can become who we want in the next 2 years, the answer is unequivocally "yes".

 

[superrific]

My point about Doherty’s recruiting was that it was up to him to recruit the high school class of 2001 (the class that would be his first recruiting class) when he took over in the spring of 2000.

Yes. And his 2001 class was pretty good! Jawad was a McD. Jackie a top 50 player. Melvin was a bit lower ranked and the analysts got that right, but IIRC he put on a shooting clinic at a camp that year and was offered. Jackie also had a week of great midrange shooting at a camp, but anyway.

I mean, two of those three guys started on one of the best teams this century. It was a pretty good class under any circumstances, and really good considering he had a late start.

Doh's problem was not recruiting. It was recruiting after people started talking about what an asshole he was. I remember Melo was considering UNC for a bit, and basically said in some informal conversation somewhere (this was prob a rumor but who knows), I'm not going near UNC as long as that guy is there.

 

[SnoopRob]

no, I meant that those other teams weren't more talented. UNC had a higher overall talent level, for sure. But when the talent is badly distributed, the overall talent level doesn't mean as much.

If you're saying that we shouldn't have lost those four games, sure. But I'll bet any coach would have lost at least one, especially since the games were early in the season and our guards had no experience in addition to their other flaws.

Ah, I misread/understood your response.

I agree that the guard talent was very inexperienced and didn't pan out to their rankings, although I think some of that was coaching and some was just natural ability.

But Carolina had enough of a talent advantage inside over those teams that they should have won all 4. The KP rankings of those 4 teams...

Hampton 116
Davidson 119
Charleston 79
Ohio 115

I mean, maybe Charleston should have been close, but the other 3 really shouldn't have been in doubt even if closer than you'd expect from a Carolina team. For comparison, the Pitt team we beat Saturday is ranked 110 by KP.

Also, the Ohio game was in mid-February that year...that wasn't an early season game.

While the talent level of the 2001-2002 team was lacking, especially in experience at the guard positions, it was also a failure of coaching for the team to be as bad as it was.