UNC Men’s Basketball 2025-2026

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SnoopRob said:
I'm quoting myself to bring forward one data set as evidence for my claim. I learned today that Bart Torvik, as part of his preseason prediction model, assigns each team a "talent rating" as part of his computation. A caveat as this is just one model, but it strikes me that given the numbers that follow, it should be a significant evidence point that talent (aka, the Jimmies and Joes) ain't the issue.

BartTorvik "Talent Rating" Under HD

2024 - 2025: 6th in the nation
2023 - 2024: 2nd in the nation
2022 - 2023: 1st in the nation
2021 - 2022: 3rd in the nation

(Note: We're 13th in this year's "talent rating", meaning that in Torvik's view we'll have the overall least talented roster in HD's tenure this year.)

As I said above, it ain't the Jimmies and Joes that's the issue.
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I’d definitely say Bart Torvik needs to improve his talent model.

If UNC’s talent level from ‘21-‘22 thru ‘24-‘25 was that high, there’d be several more Tar Heels in the NBA; and, they’d have been drafted in the 1st Round.
 
Heelsandeers said:
I’m not sure who you’re going to convince that a college team, with a starting lineup of 5 fringe-NBA/G-league players, 2 of which were future All-Americans, and one of the leading rebounders in college bball history, was in fact not talented. But it’s certainly not me
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I didn't say it wasn't talented. I said it was nowhere near the most talented. You said it yourself -- five fringe NBA-G League players. None were drafted. There are 60 drafted players every year. Say 20 of them come from abroad (second round is often full of foreign players). That leaves 40 drafted American players every year. UNC had a roster that included none of those players. They were draft eligible at different times, and could have gone pro at any time, so we are talking about a team that had roughly no players among the top 100 most talented players in college basketball. You can fiddle with the math a little but not enough to change the point

If you think that a team with no top 100 players -- or top 80 players or even top 60 players -- is one of the most talented rosters in college basketball, then yes I cannot convince you. Because you would be untethered from reality.

I don't care about future all Americans. For one thing, Caleb Love should not have been an all-American and that was just utter stupidity. Second, we are talking about talent. The NBA draft is a better measure of talent.

As for Mondo, I just don't even know what to say. You understand games played, right? Mondo played 12 more games than the all-time leader in games played pre-Covid. So he got an extra half-season on the #2 guy on the list. While he was in fact a great rebounder, citing that sort of "all-time counting stat" is not at all useful and that's even assuming that rebounding is a top tier skill. It is not. For a center, it is important but rebounding is maybe 15% of the game. 20% maybe. Again, you can quibble with the percentages but rebounding does not make a great player. If it did, Andre Drummond would not have bounced around the NBA like a billiard ball.

Incidentally, in games played pre-Covid, UNC players were #6 (Deon) and then 2 more tied for #7-#10 (Nate Britt and Hicks). That, I did not know.
 
superrific said:
I didn't say it wasn't talented. I said it was nowhere near the most talented. You said it yourself -- five fringe NBA-G League players. None were drafted. There are 60 drafted players every year. Say 20 of them come from abroad (second round is often full of foreign players). That leaves 40 drafted American players every year. UNC had a roster that included none of those players. They were draft eligible at different times, and could have gone pro at any time, so we are talking about a team that had roughly no players among the top 100 most talented players in college basketball. You can fiddle with the math a little but not enough to change the point

If you think that a team with no top 100 players -- or top 80 players or even top 60 players -- is one of the most talented rosters in college basketball, then yes I cannot convince you. Because you would be untethered from reality.

I don't care about future all Americans. For one thing, Caleb Love should not have been an all-American and that was just utter stupidity. Second, we are talking about talent. The NBA draft is a better measure of talent.

As for Mondo, I just don't even know what to say. You understand games played, right? Mondo played 12 more games than the all-time leader in games played pre-Covid. So he got an extra half-season on the #2 guy on the list. While he was in fact a great rebounder, citing that sort of "all-time counting stat" is not at all useful and that's even assuming that rebounding is a top tier skill. It is not. For a center, it is important but rebounding is maybe 15% of the game. 20% maybe. Again, you can quibble with the percentages but rebounding does not make a great player. If it did, Andre Drummond would not have bounced around the NBA like a billiard ball.

Incidentally, in games played pre-Covid, UNC players were #6 (Deon) and then 2 more tied for #7-#10 (Nate Britt and Hicks). That, I did not know.
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I’m not trying to make the case it was the most talented. I also think that is absurd

I’m only making the case that it was absurd for that team to suck so badly all year long
 
rodoheel said:
Candidly I don't find this to be any sort of meaningful explanation, but in the FAQ for his rankings generally he says it "is based on composite recruiting ranks weighted for minutes played."

T-Rank FAQ

Adam Chorlton and Bart Torvik discuss Wisconsin sports, mostly the Badgers.
adamcwisports.blogspot.com adamcwisports.blogspot.com

We have certainly had plenty of "talent" during the Hubert era from a recruiting standpoint. Have many of those guys failed to live up to their rankings? Sure. But most coaches would have loved to start their career coaching a team that featured a sophomore Love and Davis, a junior Bacot, and one of the top-rated transfers in the country in Dawson Garcia, among others. Most coaches would have loved to bring in Cadeau, Powell, and Jackson, all of whom were top 10 recruits or close to it.

Even acknowledging the relative lack of true NBA talent, I think it's really difficult to argue that lack of talent has been Hubert's problem. Lack of roster balance maybe - too many undersized guards and whiffs on a lot of big men to complement or replace Bacot have hurt. But not overall lack of talent. And NBA talent is not everything in college. Houston has had two consecutive elite seasons with exactly one draft pick the last two years, Jabal Shead (who went in the mid-2nd round). Alabama has had two good seasons in a row with no NBA draft picks, playing in a much tougher league than we do. Purdue has had one player drafted since 2023 - Edey. Great college coaches can build great college teams without NBA talent when they have to. If Hubert is a great coach - the caliber of coach we should expect at UNC - he needs to figure it out. There is, and has been, enough talent to not have any excuses in that regard.
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1. Fine, but "enough talent" isn't nearly the same as "extremely talented."
2. Houston had 2 first round picks in 2023, and then a mid second rounder in 24. Last year they had no picks, but that doesn't mean they had no NBA talent; it's way, way too early to judge that.
3. Alabama also had a first round pick in 2023, and I'd add that their 2024 team was not better than ours.
4. Whether or not HD has enough talent to figure it out is a different question than whether Bart Torvik's talent projections have any merit to them at all.
5. Cadeau wasn't a top 10 recruit at all. He was top 10 for his class, but when he reclassed, he was much lower.
6. No coach would want to start their career with Caleb Love as the PG. Really, this "talent" discussion mostly revolves around whether Caleb Love should be seen as a talented player, per his HS rankings. I say that he was not; his talent level was what he consistently showed across his college career, and that was as an average player by top 25 standards, maybe a little above average in his last seasons. He was also exactly the type of player who kills programs.

I would argue that HD's biggest failing as a coach, which incidentally he shared with many of his predecessors, is the inability or lack of interest in teaching players how to shoot. There have been so many UNC players in recent years who simply never improved their jumpers, at a tremendous cost to their basketball careers. If it was just a few guys interspersed with successes, you know, that happens. But other than Cam -- who was already a good shooter when he arrived -- what recent UNC player developed their jumper at UNC? I suppose you could argue Justin Jackson.

But we have so many Ginyards, Dexters, Leakys, along with front court players who really could have used a boost, like Hicks or Bacot. This was not Dean's strong point either -- for every Shammond there would seemingly be two Maddens or Brian Reeses. In my view, it was K's best non-flopping-related ability; guys who came to Duke unable to shoot frequently left Duke as good shooters. I was hoping that HD would change it, but alas, he has not.
 
Heelsandeers said:
I’m not trying to make the case it was the most talented. I also think that is absurd
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Well, then, next time say that, instead of contradicting me without explanation on my primary point when that wasn't even your point.

That team had major chemistry issues. That's on the coach to some degree, but only to some degree. There might also have been scheme problems, but a lot went wrong that year that wasn't HD's fault.
 
SnoopRob said:
Here's 2024-2025: Verifying Browser...

You have to change the two digits in the URL to see other years (e.g. change 25 to 24 for 2023-2024).
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In 2024, the projected talent ratings had:

1. Duke
2. UNC
3. Syracuse
7. Louisville
10. Notre Dame.

Louisville finished 8-24 with the 7th most talented roster. LOL. Notre Dame finished 13-20 with the 10th most talented roster. Syracuse's #3 talented roster finished 80 in kenpom.

It's safe to say that Torvik's model is just plain bullshit. Maybe not quite as bad as Goldman Sachs' VAR model that they used during the subprime crisis (they complained that something happened by random that would be improbable to happen even once in the history not just of our universe, but of 1000 universes), but it's really, really bad.
 
Some of these comments about analytics from posters who clearly don’t follow the sport beyond checking UNC box scores have to just be rage bait.
 
superrific said:
I would argue that HD's biggest failing as a coach, which incidentally he shared with many of his predecessors, is the inability or lack of interest in teaching players how to shoot. There have been so many UNC players in recent years who simply never improved their jumpers, at a tremendous cost to their basketball careers. If it was just a few guys interspersed with successes, you know, that happens. But other than Cam -- who was already a good shooter when he arrived -- what recent UNC player developed their jumper at UNC? I suppose you could argue Justin Jackson.

But we have so many Ginyards, Dexters, Leakys, along with front court players who really could have used a boost, like Hicks or Bacot. This was not Dean's strong point either -- for every Shammond there would seemingly be two Maddens or Brian Reeses. In my view, it was K's best non-flopping-related ability; guys who came to Duke unable to shoot frequently left Duke as good shooters. I was hoping that HD would change it, but alas, he has not.
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Eh - I don't really see that. Shooting was an issue for the 2022-23 team, when basically everyone except RJ disappointed. It has not been an issue for the others, including last year's. Lack of positional size and athleticism has been a much bigger issue, IMO. That - along with some questionable (IMO) schematic choices - is why defense has been a problem on almost all of Hubert's teams; the only exception, unsurprisingly, was his best team in 2023-24, and candidly I still don't know how Hubert and staff created a very good defensive team out of what did not look like great raw materials for a great defense. (Which they deserve credit for.)

The other thing I'll note that has plagued Hubert since he's been here: slow starts (both slow starts to seasons, and slow starts to individual games.) Too many of HD's teams have looked dysfunctional for much of the first couple months before improving over the last month or two of the season, often because it has taken the staff a while to course correct from poor scheme and personnel choices in the preseason. And too many of his teams have looked unprepared in big games, leading to big deficits and/or embarrassing losses. Hubert's record in meaningful non-conference games is abysmal; and while it's great that some of his teams have played their best ball in February and March, we can't afford to start slow as often as we have. The ACC being so crappy has meant we rarely have an opportunity for meaningful wins down the stretch, so we have to take those opportunities in non-conference play, and we simply haven't.

On that note, the early November home game against Kansas is going to have outsized importance this year; it's likely our only significant home game until January, and maybe even February, and with a softer non-conference schedule this year it may be 1 of only 2-3 Q1 nonconference games we play. We simply cannot afford to start slowly again this season, and losing that game is going to put us in a position where we may have a tough time getting back into the national conversation for weeks (unless we can go on the road and win in Rupp).
 
superrific said:
All right, that's just nonsense. Straight up nonsense. When was the last time we had an NBA player on the roster? I guess Harrison Ingram is getting a cup of coffee in the league. Pete Nance is on a two-way contract. Before Drake, we hadn't had a first round pick for a while (Sharpe, I think).

Let's look at 2022-23 more closely. Multiple teams that year had 2 first rounders on their roster. That is, 2023 first rounders. I'm not going to look into it, but they probably had future first rounders too. Like Flip, who wasn't quite a first rounder the next year, but was the #32 pick, which is considerably higher than ANY Heel he competed against.

Our roster in 22-23 featured Caleb Love, Styles, Puff, RJ, freshman Seth, Mondo, Leaky, freshman Jalen Washington, D'Marco Dunn, etc. That is nowhere near "first in talent."

If Hubert had done such a poor job with that talent, surely we'd expect the players who departed to have success elsewhere. Let's see: Dunn was like the 6th man for a bad PSU team as a senior. Puff was also on that team, as a part-time starter. He did hit 10 ppg finally in his fifth season. That team was near last in the Big 10.

Styles has been an ACC caliber player, but he's at best average for the league as a senior. At best. Caleb was the same guy at UA as he was at UNC.

That methodology is BADLY flawed and is thus useless. If it had said we were 15th in talent, maybe I could accept it as optimistic. But first is just stupid.
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Keep in mind though that NBA success as well predicted/potential for NBA success is not indicative of whether a player is a high level college talent. They are two different games and there of plenty of players who are among the best in the college game whose games will not translate as well to the NBA. Thus, they are not drafted high, if at all, and/or they don’t achieve much, if any, NBA success. But they still kill it on the college level. A team can be loaded with serious college talent without being loaded with lots of NBA talent/potential NBA talent. We’ve recently seen UNC teams like that in fairly recent years, e.g. 2016 and 2017. Tyler Hansbrough was one of the greatest college players of all time but most didn’t think his game would translate nearly as successfully to the NBA, even when he was dominating the college game.

And in this OAD era, potential for NBA success is much less indicative of college success. Many players come into college and show potential but aren’t the biggest contributors on their team and don’t fully realize their talent on the college level, but get drafted high after one year in college based on their potential. Their raw talent and potential doesn’t necessarily make them great college players and they may not be nearly as good on the college level as other players who have much less NBA potential.

As for the 2023 team, there was significant college talent. Armando Bacot was probably the best player in the ACC the previous season and was snubbed for ACC POY. RJ Davis and Caleb Love would go on to become POY on their respective conferences the following year. Davis would also be a consensus first team AA the following year and Love a second team AA on two major lists (USBWA and NABC) and third team on two others (AP and TSN).
 
Icky Mettle said:
As for the 2023 team, there was significant college talent. Armando Bacot was probably the best player in the ACC the previous season and was snubbed for ACC POY. RJ Davis and Caleb Love would go on to become POY on their respective conferences the following year. Davis would also be a consensus first team AA the following year and Love a second team AA on two major lists (USBWA and NABC) and third team on two others (AP and TSN).
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Yeah, I wonder how many other college teams in the last five years have had three guys who made All-American teams at some point on the same team?
 
Icky Mettle said:
Keep in mind though that NBA success as well predicted/potential for NBA success is not indicative of whether a player is a high level college talent.
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Well, when we say "talent" usually we mean something like raw potential. If it just meant "college ability" then it would be redundant.

Granted, NBA success or drafting is not a perfect metric at all, but I think it's at least pretty good.

It's hell of a lot better than a model that put Louisville's 8-24 team as the 10th most talented team in the country. I mean, come on. That's not quite the cosmological catastrophe, but it's one of the worst predictions I've seen in a long time.
 
superrific said:
In 2024, the projected talent ratings had:

1. Duke
2. UNC
3. Syracuse
7. Louisville
10. Notre Dame.

Louisville finished 8-24 with the 7th most talented roster. LOL. Notre Dame finished 13-20 with the 10th most talented roster. Syracuse's #3 talented roster finished 80 in kenpom.

It's safe to say that Torvik's model is just plain bullshit. Maybe not quite as bad as Goldman Sachs' VAR model that they used during the subprime crisis (they complained that something happened by random that would be improbable to happen even once in the history not just of our universe, but of 1000 universes), but it's really, really bad.
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It is even worse than I imagined. 2025:

1 UCONN
2 Illinois
3 Indiana
4 Virginia
5 Duke
6 UNC
118 Florida

I mean, LOL

Might be the first "metric" I've seen that loves the ACC
 
rodoheel said:
Eh - I don't really see that. Shooting was an issue for the 2022-23 team, when basically everyone except RJ disappointed. It has not been an issue for the others, including last year's. Lack of positional size and athleticism has been a much bigger issue, IMO. That - along with some questionable (IMO) schematic choices - is why defense has been a problem on almost all of Hubert's teams; the only exception, unsurprisingly, was his best team in 2023-24, and candidly I still don't know how Hubert and staff created a very good defensive team out of what did not look like great raw materials for a great defense. (Which they deserve credit for.)

The other thing I'll note that has plagued Hubert since he's been here: slow starts (both slow starts to seasons, and slow starts to individual games.) Too many of HD's teams have looked dysfunctional for much of the first couple months before improving over the last month or two of the season, often because it has taken the staff a while to course correct from poor scheme and personnel choices in the preseason. And too many of his teams have looked unprepared in big games, leading to big deficits and/or embarrassing losses. Hubert's record in meaningful non-conference games is abysmal; and while it's great that some of his teams have played their best ball in February and March, we can't afford to start slow as often as we have. The ACC being so crappy has meant we rarely have an opportunity for meaningful wins down the stretch, so we have to take those opportunities in non-conference play, and we simply haven't.

On that note, the early November home game against Kansas is going to have outsized importance this year; it's likely our only significant home game until January, and maybe even February, and with a softer non-conference schedule this year it may be 1 of only 2-3 Q1 nonconference games we play. We simply cannot afford to start slowly again this season, and losing that game is going to put us in a position where we may have a tough time getting back into the national conversation for weeks (unless we can go on the road and win in Rupp).
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The attitude that some of our fans had last season about those early non-conference losses was so frustrating. You can’t look at those games as exhibitions where the results don’t mean anything when the ACC is this watered down. It’s not ideal, but if we can’t at least split those games against KU and UK then we’re going into conference play with basically no margin for error.
 
Heelsandeers said:
It is even worse than I imagined. 2025:

1 UCONN
2 Illinois
3 Indiana
4 Virginia
5 Duke
6 UNC
118 Florida

I mean, LOL

Might be the first "metric" I've seen that loves the ACC
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Indeed. I am skeptical that it could even outperform "random noise + program prestige + program conference"
 
rodoheel said:
Yeah, I wonder how many other college teams in the last five years have had three guys who made All-American teams at some point on the same team?
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The 2021 UNC team actually had 4 players who would go on to be named to AA teams: Bacot, Davis, Love, and Walker Kessler.

ETA: The only other UNC teams I can think of off the top of my head to have 4 players who would be named AA at some point in their college careers were:
1972: Dennis Wuycik, Bill Chamberlain, Bob McAdoo, Bobby Jones
1984: Sam Perkins, Michael Jordan, Brad Daugherty, Kenny Smith
2016: Marcus Paige, Brice Johnson, Justin Jackson, Luke Maye

Needles to say, I’d take any three of those teams over 2021.
 
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