It was a sad sad day last year when UNC men’s basketball coach of 33 years Roy Williams announced his retirement. Williams left UNC as a Hall of Famer with over 900 wins and 3 NCAA national championships, exceeding the wins and championships of previous coach Dean Smith.Many questions were asked about who would replace Coach Williams, Hubert Davis confidently stepped into the role. Hubert Davis played at UNC under Dean Smith from 1988 to 1992 and was selected by the New York Knicks as the 20th overall pick in the 1992 NBA draft. He continued to play in the NBA until 2004, playing for the Toronto Raptors, Dallas Mavericks, Washington Wizards, Detroit Pistons, and New Jersey Nets. In 2012, Davis returned to Chapel Hill and served as an assistant coach to Williams from 2012 to 2021.

So far, Davis has led UNC to a good start of the 2021-2022 season. The Tarheels are currently 3-0 and ranked number 18 in the NCAA Men’s Basketball rankings. The key players this season will be Senior Leaky Black and Junior Armando Baycot. UNC has a pretty young team this season, so these veteran players will be very influential both on and off the court. Another key player will be sophomore Caleb Love ,who made ACC All-Freshman team, led UNC in assists, and was second in scoring, steals, and three pointers during the 2020-2021 season.

On Tuesday, I took a trip down to T.D. arena to watch the UNC Tarheels take on the CofC Cougars. Going into the game, I was expecting a win from the Tarheels because historically, they are a really good team, but I also knew that it would not be an easy win. The Cougars had their first 3-0 season start since 2018-2019, so were ready to add another win to the record. Right from the start CofC came out strong, with Australian Reyne Smith killing it with the 3’s. There was definitely a home team advantage, with 100% capacity at the arena and a very loud student section. Going into halftime, UNC trailed 42-36. However, the Tarheels turned things around in the second half, and ended up winning the game 94-83.

I honestly was not expecting such a competitive game. CofC looked really good, especially in the first half and considering they have a new coach, but ended up not being strong enough to match up with Carolina’s key players. Thankfully for UNC, they had Armando Baycot who scored a career high of 24 points and tied his career best of six blocks. I think the biggest take away from this game for the Tarheels and Hubert Davis is to work on coming out a little faster. UNC is historically a second half team, but if they want to show out and compete with higher ranked teams they are going to have to avoid slow starts.

In all, I think this game was a good test of how Hubert Davis is doing so far and I am looking forward to watching the rest of the Tarheel’s season.

UNC Men’s Basketball