Hubert Davis Catch-all

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superrific said:
All right. I'm not going to argue this point. I've been trying to stay out of the ultimate conclusion and I don't want to get into it now.

I'm just making observations and those can cut both ways at times. This observation was that framing that season as "preseason #1 -> no tourney" is unfair. If you want to consider "no tourney" on its own and find that wholly unacceptable, that's your choice and I have nothing to say about it. But it also doesn't ineluctably follow, either.
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It’s not unfair, it’s perfectly truthful.

The only way it’s unfair is if you think we were either unfairly named preseason #1 or were unfairly left out of the NCAAT.

I think you have a point that we were #1 in a subjective evaluation, but it’s a point with only limited value.
 
superrific said:
Because it wasn't top 5 either. The team shouldn't have been ranked top 10 preseason. It had been an 8 seed the year before. There wasn't a lot of depth on that team to begin with. The entire case for top 5 was a) Pete Nance doing a Brady Manek and b) Caleb's second half was real progress and not a hot streak.

That's the profile of a team in the 12-15 range with "if Pete can do a Brady, this team could have top 5 potential."

Sportswriters always overemphasize tourney results when predicting the next season, forgetting that the NCAA is a huge crapshoot and anyway it's only 6 games.

And yes, top 15 -> no tourney is not a good look, but it is an ordinary failure. It's not the extraordinary failure implied by the preseason #1 ranking. You can't pin that on HD.
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OK, Gonna just have to disagree with you here. I understand your point about overrating tourney results, but factoring in the tournament results as part of the entire season we finished 16th at KenPom. In the portal era, returning 4 starters (including Bacot who was virtually tied with Alondes Williams for ACC player of the year) plus another rotation player in Puff, from a top 20-ish team, and adding one of the top transfers in Nance, is absolutely the formula for being a top 5 team in the preseason polls next year. You are acting like it was obvious to everyone we shouldn't be ranked nearly that high. It very much was not.
 
rodoheel said:
You are acting like it was obvious to everyone we shouldn't be ranked nearly that high. It very much was not.
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At the time, I didn't think we should be ranked higher than 10. I put us at 12-15. Too many things can go wrong when last year's team had a healthy Iron Five and little else, and one of them graduated. I don't know if it was "obvious" but that was my view at the time. That's all I can speak to.
 
rodoheel said:
OK, Gonna just have to disagree with you here. I understand your point about overrating tourney results, but factoring in the tournament results as part of the entire season we finished 16th at KenPom. In the portal era, returning 4 starters (including Bacot who was virtually tied with Alondes Williams for ACC player of the year) plus another rotation player in Puff, from a top 20-ish team, and adding one of the top transfers in Nance, is absolutely the formula for being a top 5 team in the preseason polls next year. You are acting like it was obvious to everyone we shouldn't be ranked nearly that high. It very much was not.
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They really should have been better than they were. Nance was a good player. The other 4 guys were all good to excellent college players.

They just never found it. Something was off from day 1. Maybe a veteran coach navigated that thing differently and the team has some level of success. That's certainly possible but who really knows?
 
rodoheel said:
OK, Gonna just have to disagree with you here. I understand your point about overrating tourney results, but factoring in the tournament results as part of the entire season we finished 16th at KenPom. In the portal era, returning 4 starters (including Bacot who was virtually tied with Alondes Williams for ACC player of the year) plus another rotation player in Puff, from a top 20-ish team, and adding one of the top transfers in Nance, is absolutely the formula for being a top 5 team in the preseason polls next year. You are acting like it was obvious to everyone we shouldn't be ranked nearly that high. It very much was not.
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Get specific as to what HD did, or didn’t do to turn a supposed #1 team to one outside the top 68?
 
Rock said:
Really? Wild. Feel like there aren’t a lot of teams in the country that wouldn’t trade their season for UNCs.
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People who are really down on HD are pretty much limited to a subset of UNC fans. That’s why you see opinions on here that are pretty outside of what you read and hear elsewhere.
 
rodoheel said:
I'm befuddled as to what it's unfair. One, that's a simple factual statement. Two, as SnoopRob says, even if it was "top 5 -- no tourney" it would still be an equally disastrous result.
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sort of like UNC being ranked 5th in the country and finishing 13th in the ACC with a 14-19 record ?
 
14-19???
Probably Hubert’s fault.

Yes, I remember now… That was the season Roy had some back issues and he turned the reins over to assistant coach Davis to finish coaching that year. Then Roy had all those losses expunged from his record. Yeah, that’s what happened. I remember now it was all Hubert‘s fault.
 
stankeylegjones said:
Records can be deceiving, I think looking at the metrics is a far better way to look at performance. (Just look at Miami-Ohio.)
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Out of curiosity, are the UNC teams the current team is being compared to compared to their seeds at the time, frequently determined with RPI as a big factor, or have they been recalculated by the metrics of today? I don't know if it would affect anything. I'm just curious if we really are comparing apples to apples?
 
Enigma94 said:
To some people the metrics are all that matter and furthermore they are infallible. Of course right now Kenpom has UK, Ohio St and Louisville all ranked ahead of UNC.
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“It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.”
-Grantland Rice
 
heelinhell said:
sort of like UNC being ranked 5th in the country and finishing 13th in the ACC with a 14-19 record ?
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In 2019-20, we were ranked 9th preseason and moved up to 5th two weeks later after some teams ahead of us lost and we won our first few games. It was surprising that we were ranked that high considering we lost 4 of our 5 starters and our 6th man, and lost our top 5 scorers. We also lost Seventh Woods, who was our backup PG and part of the rotation. We returned 6 scholarship players, none of whom were particularly highly regarded recruits, who cumulatively averaged 19.5 ppg in 2019.

I guess people were bullish on Cole Anthony, who was very good, but he got injured, missed one-third of the season, and played hurt for most of the season. We also had a number of other key players miss games due to injury. Brandon Robinson, our third leading scorer after Anthony and Brooks, missed 9 games due to injury in the middle of the season. We were without both Robinson and Anthony for a while. Anthony Harris, who started off somewhat high in the rotation, played only 5 games before getting injured. Jeremiah Francis, who at one point was given the starting PG spot, missed half the season (he played in only 16 games) due to injury. Christian Keeling was the only scholarship player not to miss any games due to injury. The top 5 scorers on that team missed a combined 50 games due to injury that season. Things got so bad injury-wise, KJ Smith had to start 3 games.

That was not at all comparable to 2023 when we retuned 4 starters and our 6th man from the previous year’s team that lost an NCAAT championship game by just 3 points while playing with a MASH unit, and brought in a highly regarded portal prospect (who is currently playing in the NBA and recently had two games where he scored in double figures). There were no major injuries to key players other than Puff Johnson, who missed 6 games and arguably Pete Nance, who missed 3 games due to injury. That team just didn’t play together well. There was too much dribbling by the guards, very poor ball movement and spacing, and poor shot selection.

Yes, 2020 was awful (and not just in terms of basketball), but there is really no basis to compare it with what happened in 2023. In 2023, there were many reasons to expect that team to do very well.
 
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