UNC Basketball: Could UNC benefit from UK transfer Cam’Ron Fletcher?

Cam’Ron Fletcher, a former UNC basketball target, is transferring from the University of Kentucky. Could the Tar Heels benefit from his services?

Cam’Ron Fletcher was once a highly-touted recruit in the class of 2020, and held nearly 30 scholarship offers prior to his commitment to the Kentucky Wildcats. A fringe 5-star prospect at one point in his recruitment, the Vashon High School standout had offers from many of the top basketball programs in the nation including Creighton, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio State, UCLA and Virginia Tech.

After whittling his way through a who’s who list of college basketball programs, Fletcher announced his five finalists. Alabama, Kentucky, Michigan State, Missouri and North Carolina made the cut, and each school had its own merit for the St. Louis native.

He built good relationships with the coaching staffs at Alabama and Michigan State. Missouri was the hometown darling, and North Carolina had the blue blood allure. But for Fletcher, it was Kentucky that had the perfect combination of everything. Or so he thought.

He eventually committed to Kentucky in August of 2019, and that was basically the high point of his marriage to the Wildcats. It’s less than two years later, and Fletcher has decided to leave the University of Kentucky, and enter the NCAA transfer portal. That comes after a season in which we saw Fletcher play in just eight games for a whopping total of 59 minutes, spend a week away from the team as part of a disciplinary action in mid-December and be publicly embarrassed by his coach on social media. So, all in all, it sounds like it was a pretty terrible experience.

Fletcher — who averaged just 1.7 points and 1.7 rebounds per game — says that he is thankful for the year he spent in Lexington, and that he learned a lot from his first year in college, despite it not going the way that he anticipated. He is, however, looking for a fresh start elsewhere. Where that might be, we do not know. But you have to assume that he might take a look at some of the other schools he considered the first time around. Could North Carolina be one of them? And would the Tar Heels have any interest at this point?

It’s hard to say what all went down with Fletcher, his teammates and John Calipari over the past year, but it all seemed somewhat peculiar from the outside looking in. A post on social media around the time of the Fletcher’s separation from the team suggested that it was just an angry outburst from Fletcher about playing time toward the end of the Kentucky and North Carolina game. Other than that, the details around his week-long separation from the team were somewhat vague and sparse, but I’m certain that anyone taking a look at Fletcher this time around will have some questions for him when they engage in potential transfer talks.

Was there a personality conflict between Fletcher and his coach, or was it some kind of personality flaw that teams didn’t see in Fletcher the first time around?

As it relates to North Carolina, it’s widely known that Roy Williams recruits character and team fit over talent, at least if he’s tasked with choosing between the two. So, if he saw that as an issue, Fletcher wouldn’t be an option for the Tar Heels. There’s also the issue that Fletcher wasn’t known as a great perimeter shooter when he was coming out of high school, and we’ve got little evidence to suggest that he’s gotten any better in the year since. He only shot around 25 percent from three-point range his senior season, and North Carolina really doesn’t need another sub-par shooter, albeit an athletic, defensively-gifted one, on its roster.

So in short, when Fletcher hits the open market in the coming weeks after being cleared by the NCAA for a transfer from Kentucky, don’t expect the Tar Heels to come beating down his door, even if they have the availability on their 2021-22 roster.

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