UNC Men’s Basketball 2025-2026

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The talent metric is but one input into his overall model
But I was only talking about the talent metric. That's what someone (you?) cited as evidence for HD's terrible performance as coach.

It is obvious that the talent metric is garbage. Pure, unadulterated garbage.
 
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.
I haven't been arguing that point at all. I'm just questioning the suggestion that UNC has been extremely talented.

Part of the problem here is that we are working with a word "talent" that nobody has defined, probably because nobody can. It reminds me of Manager Of The Year awards in baseball, which is more or less just the guy whose team exceeded preseason expectations the most. The guy who got so much out of so little talent. Except, it turns out, those players had more talent than people thought, and the problem was the preseason ranking. I remember when Dustin Pedroia was a scrappy little guy with a bit of talent that the Red Sox maximized. Then people realized, actually he's really good.
 
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.
1. I can't give Torvik any credit for a model at all, since he won't share anything about it. As far as I can tell, there is no model. There's a column on a spreadsheet that looks more or less random.

2. "Talent" has to mean something different than "ability" or else why the fuck would we talk about it? If you have a list of 20 players with different abilities and talents, would the list ranked by ability be the same as the one ranked by talent? If so, then we're not talking about anything and the concept of "underperforming talent" is meaningless.

On the other hand, suppose we are assuming that there's some distinction between talent and ability -- i.e. the distinction between, say, Vince Carter and Ademola Okulaja as freshmen (IIRC Okulaja was the better player that year but obviously Vince surpassed him as a soph and kept going; if my memory is wrong in that specific example, we all know situations like this). If that's the case, then there will have to be ways of measuring talent isolated form ability. That's where the NBA draft comes in. It's not a perfect metric, but it's something.
 
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.
i agree with your larger point but shooting has absolutely been an issue for more teams than just the 22-23 one. Last year's team was a mediocre shooting team at a team-wide 35.6%, which isn't bad in a vacuum but they were always going to have to be much better than that to have much success with how the roster was constructed. That number is also boosted by RJ Davis and Jae'Lyn Withers catching fire late in the season after most of the damage had already been done - up until the month of March, RJ was a mere 31% shooter leading the team in 3-point attempts per game (he finished the season at a respectable 35.4%), and Withers was at a decent percentage but was taking less than two attempts a game (finished at 2.4). Cadeau, Trimble, and Tyson were all bad shooters after offseason promises of the contrary, which made them difficult-to-impossible to play together without killing spacing. Jalen Washington's small sample size of floor-stretching disappeared, which made him basically unplayable. So for a large portion of the season, the only reliable shooting we had was the two freshmen, and even they were pretty streaky.

The 23-24 team was mostly fine but it was probably held back from being better than it could've been by Cadeau and especially Withers' shooting regression from their previous years of playing basketball - that said, Ingram's positive shooting development was a positive sign for the staff.

The 22-23 team, you covered, and the 21-22 team is the only HD team I'd really say didn't have an issue with shooting in conjunction with its roster construction.

Again, in a vacuum, all of his teams have been around 35-36% shooting, but who is doing that shooting matters, as well as players' shooting development. And IMO Hubert and staff haven't done a great job with both of those aspects.

I often think about an anecdote told by a play-by-play guy in one of the earlier years of HD's tenure - a player mentioned wanting to spend time with his old shooting coach, and Hubert sat all the players down and basically said "I'm the best shooter in UNC history! You know who's second best? Coach Lebo! What do you think you're going to get from a shooting coach that we can't teach you!" IMO, that's both a worrying indicator particularly of the shooting development of this staff and emblematic how of HD's refusal to consider outside perspectives hampers him and the program. I don't think it's an accident that the best shooter he's had has been Brady Manek, who had 4 years of shooting development by another coach. The kind of jump shot taught in the 80's and early 90's that both Hubert and Lebo used doesn't really play in the contemporary version of the sport.
 
i agree with your larger point but shooting has absolutely been an issue for more teams than just the 22-23 one. Last year's team was a mediocre shooting team at a team-wide 35.6%, which isn't bad in a vacuum but they were always going to have to be much better than that to have much success with how the roster was constructed

Agreed, shooting was rarely there against better teams especially. Abysmal vs FLA, ALA, LOU, CLE, duke games, NCAAT loss

It was good enough for most UNC teams perhaps but when you can't rebound or score inside ever that won't cut it
 
So I dug through a lot of Torvik's blog posts until I found the following description for "talent"...

"It is based on composite recruiting ranks weighted for minutes played."

So, it's not useless, but it does leave a lot to be desired. It's a form of measuring "raw" talent rather than how players have developed over their career (which I guess makes some sense since he has experience as a separate input.)

While I do think that it has some obvious issues (the main one being that it doesn't take development in college into account), I think it is also useful enough to show that HD has had talented players (at least as judged coming out of HS) in his system throughout his time in CH and that talent isn't the main issue his teams have faced, which is the point I initially responded to.
 
So I dug through a lot of Torvik's blog posts until I found the following description for "talent"...

"It is based on composite recruiting ranks weighted for minutes played."

So, it's not useless, but it does leave a lot to be desired. It's a form of measuring "raw" talent rather than how players have developed over their career (which I guess makes some sense since he has experience as a separate input.)
I do not believe that. Look at those lists we've assembled. Those must be some awfully strange composite recruiting rankings. Did you know Notre Dame was a top 10 recruiting program? UVa recruited fourth best in the country?

I'd say it's more likely to be a spreadsheet error. Like, he doesn't give a shit about this metric because it sucks, so he stopped updating it, and then one of the data feeds broke and so his formula is working off half-missing data but he doesn't care.

There is no way to look at that data and think that it's actually based on composite recruiting rankings.
 
But it was the same coach and RJ was an all-American the year prior. One problem was that the team last year lacked shooting.

I've not understood why some guys can't shoot. Practice it. Is it that hard? Maybe it is. Doesn't seem like it should be to be decent. Curry is of course he's special and most people couldn't get close no matter how much practice. But 36-37% on open 3s from the college line? I mean, why not? Note that when I say "I've not understood" I'm saying that as much as an admission than accusation. But one wonders if HD was expecting some of the guys to improve their shooting and they didn't really.
Shooting while be guarded in a D-1 game is incredibly hard.
 
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.
It’s part of the issue. What have these players done at the next level? Those rankings seem off, in my opinion.
 
I believe it. But what about when wide open?
wide open, with no pressure, they do hit them. I'll always remember going to Ram's Head gym once while in undergrad and shooting around at a basket with Joel James while we waited for a game to wrap up (I think he was waiting for a friend, he certainly wasn't playing pickup lol). He hit something like 12 threes in a row. Joel James!

the shrinking windows of opportunity and the speed at which you have to operate in live game settings means that nothing is really "wide open" in that same way.
 
the shrinking windows of opportunity and the speed at which you have to operate in live game settings means that nothing is really "wide open" in that same way.
I get it, but sometimes guys are WIDE FUCKING OPEN. Like nobody within 8 feet of them. And they brick. Hell, sometimes they have time to do a little shimmy, or think about it, look to pass, then shoot.

I'd believe fatigue plays a bigger factor than maybe I appreciate, but seriously. We have other data points. Guys who shoot like 50-60% from the line. Even at the beginning of the game. How are they hitting 12 threes in a row but can't hit 2 FTs after playing 3 minutes? Not saying you're lying, but that had to be a fluke.

Similarly, we see guys compete in the NBA three point shooting contest, where there's no defense and nobody hits 12 in a row. Best shooters in the world. You can watch them during warmups -- nobody is draining everything.
 
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