Who had the better debut, Scheyer or Davis? :: WRALSportsFan.com
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I asked for good questions, and yet again, you all have delivered. Did I make sure I only viewed your Mailbag tweets today so that I could stay within Twitter’s rate limit and not get shut out of my account? Yes. But I made it work. We all did. Thank you.
And so this week, I’ll get into who had the better coaching debut between Jon Scheyer and Hubert Davis, LaMelo Ball’s max deal, possible ACC expansion and the best takeout.
Let’s get into it!
I got quite a few questions that made me think, and this was one of them! There are some commonalities: both at least flirted with not making the NCAA Tournament (UNC a bit more, um, aggressively than Duke), both had trouble with inconsistent 3-point shooting and both struggled with some up-and-down play in the backcourt at times. Duke got its proverbial stuff together by mid-February and didn’t lose a game again until the NCAA Tournament.
While UNC did win 11 of its final 13 regular-season games, that loss to Pitt at home (which finished 2022 ranked 195 in Ken Pom) was horrendous and enough of a head-scratcher to leave doubt about the Tar Heels. They did finish the season with the same number of regular-season losses as Duke, but no title.
Both had to tweak the way they used their personnel along the way to find success. Both Scheyer and Davis had the pressure of following legends, and that is nothing to sneeze at for either one. Especially for Scheyer, as he watched his mentor lose in painful fashion both his final home game and his final actual game to their archrival and a coach that was in the same position he would be in the next year.
But there are some important differences. Duke was a better defensive team all year than Carolina was. Duke won the ACC Tournament. But of course North Carolina beat Duke in the regular-season finale and then went on a run to the Final Four, knocking off three of Ken Pom’s top 11 teams along the way before falling by 3 to Kansas in the title game.
It’s not entirely fair because we have another year of data for Davis and we don’t for Scheyer yet, but with a lot of the same players back last year, UNC wasn’t able to recapture that magic. I’m trying not to let this year influence my evaluation of that year. But in a way, I’m almost more impressed with the job that Davis did the year before in getting a team whose closest loss to a Ken Pom top-15 team was by 9 and that had one win over a Ken Pom top-50 team before January 24 to go on the postseason run that it did.
Coaching in the NCAA Tournament with short turnarounds, potential matchup pitfalls and all kinds of other things you can’t possibly predict or plan for (although you try to) is its own beast, and I’m sure Scheyer will do fine. Carolina didn’t even make it to try this season, though, and Davis will have to get the regular season figured out.
Who had the better debut, Scheyer or Davis? :: WRALSportsFan.com 2023-07-03 00:48:00