The Carolina Blues: How UNCs made-for-championship season turned disastrous

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Some players gathered in the Dean Smith Center, to watch as a group. Others crowded around the TV in their dorms or homes, preferring somewhere private to process tough news.

It was March 12, Selection Sunday, and as CBS’ crew kept calling teams, North Carolina players waited. Prayed. Hoped for inclusion.

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It took hearing all 68 team names — UNC not among them — for reality to set in. The Tar Heels were the first preseason No. 1 since the NCAA Tournament expanded in 1985 to miss the field altogether.

What a far cry it was from the previous year, when UNC’s entire team — still basking in having beaten Mike Krzyzewski in his final Duke home game — met at head coach Hubert Davis’ house to celebrate its inclusion in the Big Dance, and to find out where it’d be heading next. That would be Fort Worth, Texas, as the No. 8 seed in the East — the jumping-off point for the team’s eventual run to the national championship game.

“Some people think Carolina being in the NCAA Tournament is a given,” Davis said that day, “but it isn’t.”

And here, a year later, was the proof.

Davis gathered his players and staff, at 7 p.m., in the home locker room. Some were glassy-eyed, tearful. Others stoic, the news still sinking in. But Davis’ message was clear: It was time to get North Carolina back to where North Carolina is supposed to be.

So ends one of the most disappointing seasons not just in program history, but in the annals of college basketball. Davis’ team returned four starters from a team that held a 15-point halftime lead over Kansas in the national title game, but that group never recaptured their magic. The ripple effect of this season — a mass exodus of players departing Chapel Hill — is already underway. But still, one question lingers:

How did this season go so wrong?

The Athletic spoke to people inside the program — parents of players, and basketball industry contacts — to answer just that. Those conversations revealed several issues, both psychological and basketball-related, that culminated in the Tar Heels’ downfall: shaky roster construction; chemistry issues; the natural growing pains of a second-year head coach; and an overwhelming inability to handle outside “noise,” both praise and criticism.

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“You can only do so much or say so much,” said one parent, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the program. “Everybody still has to be on the same page — and the bottom line is, everybody wasn’t.”

Understanding how this season unraveled requires a cursory understanding of North Carolina’s recent basketball history.

In both 2016 and 2017, the Tar Heels were a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, sporting teams befitting a blue blood’s tradition. After Kris Jenkins’ buzzer-beater in the 2016 title game, UNC completed its “redemption” tour the following season, winning the program’s seventh — and Roy Williams’ third — national championship. Despite a lingering investigation at the time, into the university’s academic-athletic scandal — which was ultimately resolved in October 2017 without penalties for the school or its flagship men’s basketball program — North Carolina was atop the college hoops hierarchy.

And then, very quickly, it fell off.

Because despite earning a top-2 seed the next two seasons, UNC failed to advance past the Sweet 16 either time, instead bowing out of the bracket via double-digit blowouts. That slippage hit a new low in 2019-20, when the Tar Heels went 14-19 — the only losing season of Williams’ Hall of Fame career — and posted the second-worst record in modern-era program history. (The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of March Madness, but the Tar Heels wouldn’t have been invited anyway.) By comparison, the 2020-21 team that earned a No. 8 seed was an improvement … until its 23-point first-round loss to Wisconsin, the only time in Williams’ career that his team lost its initial NCAA Tournament game. He retired, abruptly, weeks later.

That, not the championship pedigree that preceded it, is the North Carolina basketball that Davis’ core group of players — Leaky Black, Armando Bacot, Caleb Love and R.J. Davis — knew firsthand. Black was an injured and little-used bench player on the 2018-19 team. Bacot was a five-star freshman starter for the 2019-20 squad. And Love and Davis started most of the 2020-21 season, after entering school in the midst of the pandemic.

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“What did we have to lose last season?” one parent said of the circumstances Davis inherited in his first year as head coach. “There was this downness … We’re not winning to the level people expect us to.”

And that trend continued for most of Davis’ first season. The Tar Heels lost four of their first 23 games by more than 20 points and were squarely on the bubble in the back half of February. “People act like we were this team last year that really bulldozed and ran through people,” said Dennis Love, the father of junior guard Caleb Love. “That’s not who we were.” Instead the team started jelling later in February, once forward Brady Manek was inserted full-time into the starting lineup, and then went on its now-famous postseason run.

One exceptional, otherworldly month, after years falling short of expectations.

Expectedly — and deservedly — praise enveloped North Carolina’s program. With four starters and several young reserves returning, UNC carried that positive buzz through the preseason. Behind the scenes, Davis — who faced those high expectations as both a player and assistant coach — stressed to his players the change in how they’d be viewed this season, per multiple sources. “He impressed upon them a lot at the beginning that they had gone from the hunter to the hunted,” one parent said, “and that they needed to know what that was.” But awash in positive coverage for the first time in their college careers, the Tar Heels either didn’t hear him or didn’t heed him. They were intoxicated by the attention.

“They had this laissez-faire, la la la, we’re getting all this good publicity,” another parent said. “It felt good to them because of all the negative that they had (dealt with) previously. So maybe they got caught up in that.”

The impact on individual players is unknowable. But collectively, it was clear.

“I don’t think any of those kids,” Dennis Love said, “were really prepared for what came with having that No. 1 label on your back.”

The on-court cracks appeared almost instantly.

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Not only did the Tar Heels struggle to put away Gardner-Webb and Portland early in the nonconference schedule, the energy they had in the postseason was abandoned. That missing fire wasn’t just perception, but something admitted inside the locker room. “Sometimes,” junior R.J. Davis said after one game, “that’s not really there.” Publicly, doubts were largely dismissed. Surely, eventually, the team would rediscover the sense of urgency it had the previous spring.

And it did … but only after a four-game losing streak in late November that, according to one person inside the program, rocked the team’s confidence “more than people realized.” In two weeks, UNC went from No. 1 to unranked, the fastest fall out of the polls for any top-ranked preseason program.

Suddenly, sharply, the tenor of that outside noise changed.

“You’ve gotta have leadership, man, that really can prepare those kids to insulate themselves,” Dennis Love said, “on what the mindset is that is required. Because the team really had enough talent.”

But there were questions even early on about how those talented pieces fit together. Specifically, how would the team replace Manek’s production and 3-point gravity? From March 1 through the national championship game — when UNC was No. 1 in Bart Torvik’s efficiency rankings — Manek hit 44.1 percent of his 7.6 3-point tries per game, including at least three made 3s in eight of those nine games. His floor-spacing was critical in opening up driving lanes for Love and R.J. Davis, and space in the post for Bacot to operate. “Brady made those other guys look so much better,” one NBA scout said. With Manek out of eligibility, though, the Tar Heels turned to the transfer portal to fill their void at power forward, signing Northwestern’s Pete Nance. While Nance made 45.2 percent of his 3s in his last season at Northwestern, he did so on just 92 attempts — which is how many Manek had through UNC’s final 13 games.

The on-court result? A lack of proper spacing and an inefficient offense. Nance also struggled fitting into a preconceived role, and regressed in doing so. After averaging 1.082 points per possession (PPP) in spot-up scenarios his final season at Northwestern — which ranked in the 82nd percentile nationally, earning a “very good” designation from Synergy — Nance fell off to 0.716 PPP in those same spot-up situations at UNC. That put him in just the 21st percentile nationally, with a “below average” designation, despite that being his most-frequent offensive action.

Beyond Nance, the team’s core four returners — R.J. Davis, Bacot, Black, and Love — also struggled. Davis dislocated a finger on his shooting hand and shot 27.3 percent from 3 through the first 10 games. Bacot had injury issues (ankle, shoulder), too, which cost him the bulk of three games. And Bacot’s effectiveness waned as the season progressed; the ACC Preseason Player of the Year did not have a 20-point game after Jan. 24, with UNC losing seven of those final 12 contests. Black posted a career-high 7.3 points per game, but the longest-tenured Tar Heel — who played 155 games across five seasons, more than anyone else in program history — ended his career never having scored double-digit points in consecutive contests. With his teammates banged-up and slumping, a larger share of the offense flowed through Love, whose inefficiency in past seasons continued to compound. For the season, per KenPom, Love took 28.4 percent of the team’s shots while he was on the court — 4.5 percent more than the next-closest player — despite posting the lowest effective field-goal percentage on the team. He took 88 more shots than R.J. Davis, who was second in attempts, and 163 more than Bacot.

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By season’s end, Love had missed 171 3-pointers; R.J. Davis, second on the team in 3-point tries, had attempted 174.

It culminated in the second-worst 3-point shooting team in UNC history, behind only Williams’ 2019-20 squad. The 31.2 percent these Tar Heels shot from deep was worst in the ACC, 323rd nationally, and seventh-worst among all power conference teams.

The Love situation was especially tricky. One school of thought, according to multiple team sources, was that Love could be selfish at times, worried more about proving himself for the NBA than what was best for the team. “Likes to chuck the ball,” one NBA scout said, “and given a lot of freedom in doing so.” But, that same scout said, there was also a need — on a roster with inconsistent parts — for someone to take those shots. Plus, given Love’s heroics during the 2022 postseason — he scored 27 second-half points in UNC’s Sweet 16 win over UCLA, and hit the game-deciding 3 against Duke in the Final Four — sitting someone who could get so hot was a difficult sell. “You didn’t know what you were getting from Pete, nor did you know what you were getting from Leaky, night-in and night-out,” the scout added. “I think it was extremely necessary.”

Considering Love entered this season as a projected first-round NBA pick, there was self-awareness of his shortcomings. “Unfortunately he didn’t play up to his own standards, and he knows that,” Love’s father said of his son’s play. But there’s no escaping the larger context of what the junior guard was often asked to do. “When the shot clock is running down and they say, ‘Hey, Caleb, here, go take care of this,’” his father added, “he was willing to do that.”

Naturally, as the season progressed without surefire improvements, emotions bubbled off the court. One parent told The Athletic that before Christmas, their son commented that the team needed to care more about every aspect of the game. “You’ve got to care about the scoring,” that parent recalled, “but you’ve gotta care about everything else, too: defense, passing the ball.”

Those veiled shots were evidence of chemistry issues below the surface. One such example: Four of UNC’s starters — everyone but R.J. Davis — were nominated for individual preseason honors, including Love being named to the watch list for the Bob Cousy Award, given annually to the nation’s top point guard. When Davis — whose shift to point guard in the postseason coincided with UNC’s success — wasn’t included, North Carolina was told he would instead be on the watch list for the Jerry West Award, given to the nation’s top shooting guard, because the committee was opposed to listing two players from one school. At that point, R.J. Davis, according to multiple sources, preferred to be taken off the Jerry West Award list — which he was — due to a combination of feeling slighted and wanting to be honored as a point guard only (given that, at 6 feet tall, that’s the position he would play professionally).

Publicly, UNC’s two starting guards got along fine. And even behind the scenes, sources maintain they were friends. But their positional overlap was real, and complicated to juggle, which led to on-court confusion and off-court frustration. “It felt like,” a person close to one player said, “they didn’t know who was supposed to have the ball in their hands at the end of the game, throughout the whole year.” The stats back that up: UNC’s ball movement stagnated dramatically, and it posted the fewest assists of any team in program history, at least since assists became a recorded stat. That coincided with falling out of the top-300 nationally in assist rate, and both starting guards’ individual rates dropping from the year prior.

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It was a fit problem the coaching staff never solved. UNC scored 5.9 more points per 100 possessions when just Love was in the game, per CBB Analytics, but allowed 16.7 fewer points per 100 possessions when just Davis was in.

Between that lack of internal chemistry and increasing external criticism, the emotional toll on Love and the rest of the team kept growing.

“We never looked like,” one parent said, “who we always felt like we were supposed to be.”

So, what is a head coach’s role in all this?

In his first season leading the Tar Heels, Hubert Davis came within 20 minutes of winning the national title. He was rewarded with a contract extension (and raise), and two national coach of the year awards. But growing into the role didn’t come without bumps.

“The blame is definitely not all on him, but as the head coach, you get the credit when you win and the blame when you lose,” a person close to one player said. “It’s a combination of him, his staff, and the players, and the leadership — or lack thereof — that was seen for 30 games.”

To what extent Davis prepared his players for the emotional drain of being preseason No. 1 depends on who you ask. But the roster construction, certainly, was his doing, as was UNC’s style of play. Observers questioned some of Davis’ strategic decisions, specifically defensively, where the Tar Heels’ preferred drop coverage led to yearlong struggles defending ball screens.

“We never addressed that the entire season,” Dennis Love said. “The limitations that caused us to lose some games last year and be on the bubble, those things showed their ugly head again.”

Over the summer, Davis also stressed a need to improve UNC’s depth, after relying almost solely on the “Iron Five” starters — all of whom played at least 30 minutes nightly — throughout the 2022 postseason. Davis even said after the Final Four that he felt his team — which was 348th nationally in bench minutes, per KenPom — was “tired” by the time it reached the title game. So this summer, North Carolina welcomed three four-star freshmen — point guard Seth Trimble, wing Tyler Nickel, and forward Jalen Washington — to campus, while also bringing back three other former four-star recruits: wings Puff Johnson and Dontrez Styles, and guard D’Marco Dunn. “I don’t want to play five,” the head coach said in June. “I want to have a bigger rotation.”

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Instead, UNC played its bench even less this season, despite inconsistency from its starters and four-star recruits stockpiled on the sideline. North Carolina’s percentage of bench minutes dropped from 19.8 percent to 18.3 percent this season, less than only three other Division I teams. Since the end of the season, Styles, Nickel and Johnson already have entered the transfer portal. The lack of bench opportunities, some parents opined, may have also contributed to the team’s decision to decline an NIT invitation. (Players ultimately voted on the Saturday before Selection Sunday whether or not they wanted to play in the NIT. “Most didn’t,” one program source said, with another adding that while the decision wasn’t unanimous, it was the consensus.)

Multiple sources also questioned Davis’ accountability with players. During a seven-game stretch in February, for example, Nance made just 2-of-23 3-pointers and shot under 30 percent overall — but Davis still started and played Nance for 28 minutes per game; UNC lost five of those seven games. And with Love, seemingly no number of misguided or contested attempts was enough to earn him a spot on the bench; Davis did sit Love for five first-half minutes against Duke in UNC’s regular-season finale, after an ill-advised stepback 3, but that was a rare exception.

“I would say there was probably like, 5 percent out of 100 of accountability, in and out of practice and games,” a person close to a player said. “There was barely any.”

Of course, Davis’ role in UNC’s unraveling also has layers. He inherited many of these players, including the core four from the only Williams-led team to lose in the NCAA Tournament’s first round. And, although it seems distant now, he was at the helm for that magical march to New Orleans last spring. Square that together with this season’s inconsistency, and it becomes difficult to evaluate Davis independently.

“It’s not just the kids here, you know? It’s both sides,” one parent said. “Yes, coaches put the players out there, and the kids have to make plays. It’s a lot. It goes both ways.”

So, what comes next for North Carolina?

In some ways, something necessary: a clean slate. Since the season’s end, in addition to Nance and Black exhausting their eligibility, six Tar Heels have entered the transfer portal — including, as of Monday, Love. Somehow, surprising as it is, the player who hit one of the most-celebrated shots in North Carolina basketball history — a photo of which still hangs in Hubert Davis’ office — will be playing next season in a different college uniform.

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“When Caleb shot the ball against Duke in the Final Four, to get to the championship game, a lot of people can say that was a bad shot,” Dennis Love said. “But you know why they don’t say it? Because it went in.”

And yet, Love’s departure means at least eight scholarship players from this season — including four of the top six scorers — will be gone. If not for Bacot, R.J. Davis, and promising sophomore big Jalen Washington announcing their returns for 2023-24, it would be fair to call this a total rebuild. Even still, it’s a radical roster makeover. Only two of those open scholarships will be filled by incoming recruits, four-stars Simeon Wilcher and Zayden High, but UNC’s 2024 class — which is No. 1 nationally, with four top-40 commitments — looms large for the future.

Still, this offseason, for the first time since becoming UNC’s head coach in April 2021, Hubert Davis will get a chance to remake the Tar Heels as he sees fit.

It’s an opportunity Davis, despite this season’s shortcomings, deserves. But it’s also one, given how his second season unfolded, that he now must ace.

“I want to see what he does with his own guys. I’m kind of undetermined right now,” said one NBA scout, asked to evaluate Davis as a coach. “The jury’s still out for me, because it was the highest of highs — and the lowest of lows.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Peyton Williams / Getty Images)

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