UNC Men’s Basketball 2025-2026

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Peppers49 said:
You’ve had some terrible takes in this thread but this is probably the dumbest one. Take a lap.
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He was an inefficient scorer who rarely created for his teammates, was prone to major defensive lapses, and whose teams routinely underperformed their talent level.

His only talent was high usage, which isn't nothing, but high usage + horrible efficiency = not a good player.

It was no accident that UNC got a lot better when Caleb left.
 
So true. Most fans are still thinking it's the classic Roy era where the Heels could play a hard pre ACC schedule and take their lumps and then finish high in the ACC thereby earning a high NCAA seed. The Tier system together with the collapse of the ACC in national rankings has ended that model. These early games mean A LOT.
 
Ramrouser said:
So true. Most fans are still thinking it's the classic Roy era where the Heels could play a hard pre ACC schedule and take their lumps and then finish high in the ACC thereby earning a high NCAA seed. The Tier system together with the collapse of the ACC in national rankings has ended that model. These early games mean A LOT.
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Also, UNC fans seem to have the impression that Roy's teams started slowly and lost a lot of non-conference games. While there were certainly some Roy teams that fit the bill, his performance in marquee non-conference games, even if you only look at the back half of his UNC career, was leaps and bounds better than Hubert's.
 
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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I think you're vastly overrating future NBA talent as opposed to effective college talent and Torvik's model is focused on effective college talent.

A prime example would be someone like Armando Bacot. He's, at very best, a fringe NBA player, was not drafted, and thus far has not made an NBA roster. But he was 1st/2nd team All-ACC for his last 3 years at Carolina and was 3rd team All-American by at least 1 group in both of his last 2 seasons. In short, he's a monster college talent.

So, you can be stacking players like Bacot (read: RJ Davis, Caleb Love, Harrison Ingram, etc) and have great college talent without having any high level NBA draft picks. And if you stack this kind of talent, you would have teams far more talented than most in college even without the NBA draft picks.

Let's look at how Torvik's model handles elite talent that isn't surrounded by great talent by looking at Rutgers in 2024-2025. Torvik has them ranked #55 despite having the 2nd and 3rd recruits in the 2024 HS class (according to 247) who went on to be drafted 2nd and 5th in the 2025 NBA draft. Why were they ranked so low? Because the rest of the roster was very low on talent and so the roster, as a whole, wasn't very talented. And that team went on to finish 15-17 because the rest of the talent beyond Bailey and Harper was fairly poor, leading to poor team outcomes.

My hunch is that Torvik's talent model emphasizes (1) experienced very good to great college talent over inexperienced NBA potential talent and (2) deep benches over thin benches. I'm sure there's some room for improvement, but the model seems much better than "BADLY flawed" and "useless".
 
superrific said:
Yeah, I did that on purpose.

If we're going to complain about the 23 team, shouldn't we note that our next team, minus Caleb, was much better?
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Yes, the 2023-24 team was good - the only one of Hubert's UNC teams that lived up to expectations in the regular season. Did you also not notice that the Arizona team Caleb led that year was also really good? or that Caleb's team last year was much better than UNC's team?

Listen, I share your frustration about Caleb's time at UNC. I was tired of watching him and ready for him to move on. But you are letting your obvious dislike of Caleb crowd out every other aspect of this discussion. However you want to assess "talent" I think it's pretty clear that Hubert's UNC teams have routinely underperformed relative to their talent level. I doubt you can find very many people who disagree with that.
 
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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The talent metric is but one input into his overall model (for preseason, it eventually reduces to zero influence once a significant number of games are played).

For those ACC teams you think show that his talent model is so lacking? Here's their overall preseason rankings...

Duke - 8th
UNC - 13th
Syracuse - 117th
Louisville - 158th
Notre Dame - 207th (Also, ND was 14th in talent instead of 10th, but not a major error.)

In each of the 3 ACC teams you think show that Torvik's model is bad, he correctly projected that the team's performance would be mediocre (at best) to bad.

In short, all 3 of them are identified as teams with significant talent who were expected to significantly underperform their talent levels.

All this would ultimately show is that talent is not the only input into eventual success and that other inputs can cause a team to play well below their talent level...which is what Torvik's model predicted would happen in all 3 examples you picked.
 
superrific said:
He was an inefficient scorer who rarely created for his teammates, was prone to major defensive lapses, and whose teams routinely underperformed their talent level.

His only talent was high usage, which isn't nothing, but high usage + horrible efficiency = not a good player.

It was no accident that UNC got a lot better when Caleb left.
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Caleb leaving UNC was best for both sides.

To say that someone who was a conference POY and 2x 1st team all conference selection in one of the toughest leagues in the sport (and also made an AA Team) was never a good player is just asinine. Come on now.
 
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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Where Torvik had those teams in his overall preseason rankings...

UConn - 13
Illinois - 21
Indiana - 30
Virginia - 72
Duke - 2
UNC - 5
Florida - 36 (Note: KenPom had them 26 and Evan Miya had them 32, pretty much everyone missed how good Florida would be.)

You're again making talent a much bigger part of overall team projection than Torvik's model does, which only sees it as one input into team projected success.
 
Peppers49 said:
Caleb leaving UNC was best for both sides.

To say that someone who was a conference POY and 2x 1st team all conference selection in one of the toughest leagues in the sport (and also made an AA Team) was never a good player is just asinine. Come on now.
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Having RJ and Caleb on the same team was not a good situation for either player or UNC.

Both have major limitations - RJ’s mostly revolve around his height. Caleb’s limitations are greater; but, center on Caleb thinking he’s a lot more athletic than he really is and shying away from contact on drives and often laziness on defense.
 
Peppers49 said:
Caleb leaving UNC was best for both sides.

To say that someone who was a conference POY and 2x 1st team all conference selection in one of the toughest leagues in the sport (and also made an AA Team) was never a good player is just asinine. Come on now.
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UNC's problem with Caleb & RJ was that they had two very, very similar players who didn't fit well together outside of a few weeks in 2022. I think that the team would have been reasonably successful with either one of them alone, but both playing major minutes at the same time led to an imbalanced team.

Which goes to show that you can have a very talented team that may not be set up for team success.
 
SnoopRob said:
UNC's problem with Caleb & RJ was that they had two very, very similar players who didn't fit well together outside of a few weeks in 2022. I think that the team would have been reasonably successful with either one of them alone, but both playing major minutes at the same time led to an imbalanced team.

Which goes to show that you can have a very talented team that may not be set up for team success.
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It’s like a fantasy football team with great WRs and no RBs. You need to make a trade. A team without balance is not a talented team.
 
Also, if anyone here happens to have an EvanMiya subscription, he has a talent ranking available for each season, but it's behind his subscription wall. If you have access, I'd appreciate it if you could get our respective rankings for 2021-2022 through 2024-2025. Thanks!
 
Caleb Love hit shots that completely fucked The Rat and all his Minions. He ruined their Party TWICE in a period of weeks.

Even though he left, I'll still drink coffee out of my Caleb Love mug on days when we play dook.
 
SnoopRob said:
The talent metric is but one input into his overall model (for preseason, it eventually reduces to zero influence once a significant number of games are played).

In short, all 3 of them are identified as teams with significant talent who were expected to significantly underperform their talent levels.

All this would ultimately show is that talent is not the only input into eventual success and that other inputs can cause a team to play well below their talent level...which is what Torvik's model predicted would happen in all 3 examples you picked.
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SnoopRob said:
You're again making talent a much bigger part of overall team projection than Torvik's model does, which only sees it as one input into team projected success.
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I would expect a talent metric to be in line with the predictive metrics. Not loosely correlated, at best

This dumb metric isn't rating elite teams high with any consistency (despite predicting those teams to be good) and regularly identifying bad teams as being highly talented (despite predicting them to be bad)

Whatever this metric is identifying, it isn't talent in the context that those who watch sports would understand it to mean
 
SnoopRob said:
My hunch is that Torvik's talent model emphasizes (1) experienced very good to great college talent over inexperienced NBA potential talent and (2) deep benches over thin benches. I'm sure there's some room for improvement, but the model seems much better than "BADLY flawed" and "useless".
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It truly is a mystery

Last season Auburn, despite being one of the oldest and deepest teams in cbball, rated somewhere between Longwood and Rice

Useless sounds about right
 
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