For a program that values continuity above almost anything else, there’s an unusual degree of uncertainty surrounding what North Carolina will actually look like Friday night, when it hosts Elizabeth City State in what is usually a mostly meaningless exhibition but carries real meaning this time.
Hubert Davis must have taken a lot of notes in the years he spent on the bench with Roy Williams, because he hasn’t been shy about identifying areas for change since taking over as head coach, whether it’s the basic offensive structure of the team or areas of emphasis on defense — what he called “some tweaks, some changes, some pivots.”
Some programs go through this every fall, for better or worse, weathervanes twisting in the prevailing talent breeze. That’s not North Carolina. Never has been. Given how predictable UNC was under Williams, and under Bill Guthridge and Dean Smith, year after year after year, it’s an extraordinary moment for North Carolina. And it arrives as Davis has, in almost every other area, tried to strengthen and reinforce links to North Carolina’s past since taking over.
“It’ll look like UNC basketball,” Davis promised Wednesday. “The foundation has been set. It has worked for a number of years. It’s tried and tested and proven successful and as long as I’m here that not going to change.”
Some of the tweaks are obvious already. It was clear just from the Late Night exhibition that Williams’ two-post orthodoxy has been abandoned, with Brady Manek and Dawson Garcia brought in as transfers expressly to play that role and Armando Bacot encouraged to roam away from the basket and broaden his repertoire. (Even then, it’s fair to ask how much of a change that really is. North Carolina won its last national title with Luke Maye playing just like that.)
Defensively, Davis has talked about the need for general improvement but especially guarding the 3-point line, a frequent complaint among the doctors and lawyers and laymen whose criticisms used to so vex Williams. Wednesday, he also talked about being more unpredictable on defense, especially applying various forms of pressure more often, and he’s given every indication his bench rotation will be just as deep as Williams’ were so he should have the fresh legs to do it.
All of this is, as much as anything Davis has done or said since taking the job, a reason to have confidence in the first-year head coach. It would be easy — easiest of all — to say that UNC basketball isn’t broken enough to need fixing, and point at Williams’ belief that he wasn’t getting the best out of his own players to say there’s more than enough untapped potential there for immediate improvement.
Davis hasn’t done that. He has tried to walk a very fine line between genuine reverence for the past and honest acknowledgment that some of the core tenets of the program needed recalibrating for the present and future. That can be tricky to pull off. How much can you change before you start to change the foundation itself? Davis appears willing to find out.
There’s no questioning his commitment to the roots of the program. His shoes bear an homage to Smith. His staff is composed of players pulled from the glorious eras of Carolina basketball he knows: Smith and Guthridge and Williams.
Still: There’s also no questioning the program, at the end of Williams’ tenure, needed some modernization by someone other than Williams. The dogmatic coach was far too tied to what made him so successful to invite a true reevaluation himself, and given just how successful he was, there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be up to his successor, whoever that may have been, to cast an appraising and skeptical eye upon the program and invite change.
Davis has not shied away from that task.
How much change, that is the real question: Enough to coax the Tar Heels fully into a more positionless era of college basketball, yet not so much that there’s a risk of losing touch with everything that makes Carolina basketball so recognizable.
Davis says things should look familiar on Friday. It’ll be fascinating to see what doesn’t.
