Wednesday’s ACC Roster Shuffle News: Simeon Wilcher Asks UNC For A Release
Ahhhh.....seeeya!
It’s tempting to feel a little bad for Hubert Davis. No one doubts that he’s a good guy. Even Duke fans will concede that.
Other than getting hot at the end of his first season and (from a UNC perspective) killing the Coach K vampire not just once but twice in the final stretch of his epic career - things haven’t really gone that well for UNC under Davis.
Think about it.
Last season, picked as the #1 team pre-season, UNC didn’t even make the postseason (they weren't picked for the NCAA and turned down the NIT).
And aside from a dispiriting season, which players showed distinct improvement last season?
We’ll give Armando Bacot a pass due to several injuries, but ask yourself: Have his skills improved? Has he learned to shoot away from the basket? What about RJ Davis? Leaky Black? Pete Nance? Dontrez Styles? D’Marco Dunn? RJ Davis? Caleb Love?
Yeah...not so much.
Still, Davis showed some chops in recruiting, bringing in Zayden High and Simeon Wilcher for next season and lining up Drake Powell, James Brown, Ian Jackson and Elliot Cadeau for the season after that.
But Cadeau announced that he would reclassify on May 30th and now Wilcher, who remember is a high school teammate of former Duke commit Mackenzie Mgbako, seeing a crowded backcourt, is out.
And the backcourt is indeed crowded.
UNC will have Cadeau, Davis, sophomore Seth Trimble, Notre Dame transfer Cormac Ryan, Stanford transfer Harrison Ingram and Brown transfer Paxson Wojcik.
Davis has also seen seven players hit the transfer portal, which is a lot, particularly since UNC should be a destination station rather than a departure point.
If we’re counting correctly, the only consequential players returning for UNC are Bacot, Trimble, Davis and Jalen Washington, who was limited by a high school knee injury last season but who is undeniably talented and a major wild card for next season.
But two years into Davis’s tenure, going on three, instability is still there. Love never became the player Davis wanted, which is probably Davis’s fault. At a minimum, he could have let him figure it out on the bench instead of being a prolific (and very poor) shooter.
Losing Love may be addition by subtraction, we’re inclined to think that it is, but Davis still has to incorporate a whole bunch of new players and we’ll have to see how that goes. We’re in a different era now where rosters are blown up and rebuilt in a matter of weeks. Some guys are really good at it and some less so. We still don’t know where Davis is on that scale exactly but it feels safe to say he’s not at an Eric Musselman level yet and so far, UNC’s transition to the Davis era has not gone as well as people down on that end of 15-501 had hoped.
By the way, after the news about Wilcher’s departure broke, both High and Bacot posted about it on Twitter. High just made some unhappy emoticon faces, but Bacot posted this: “Running from the grind.” You have to give him that. We’re not particularly fans of his as you might have gathered over the last few years, but unlike Wilcher, he didn’t back away from a challenge.
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