Hubert Davis is no stranger to lineup changes. He staved off a potential midseason collapse by inserting Derek Dixon into the lineup for Kyan Evans, and has even tinkered with a few Jaydon Young starts throughout the year. However, Caleb Wilson’s broken hand could force him to start from scratch.
For all the different iterations Davis has run out on the floor, the one that makes the most sense as his starting, or more importantly, closing five without Wilson, has hardly played together. Dixon, Seth Trimble, Luka Bogavac, Jarin Stevenson, and Henri Veesaar have logged just 16 minutes as a group all season and have played together in only seven of 24 games (according to CBBanalytics.com).
Davis has other potential combinations, but that group will need to see significant time together down the stretch of the regular season and into the postseason if Wilson is unable to return. In his fifth season, getting a new lineup to coalesce quickly this late into the year could be Davis’s biggest challenge.
Davis’s likely Caleb Wilson-less lineup has hardly played together this season
Davis is quite certainly off the hot seat, not just for the win over Duke with Wilson, but because the injury will act as a built-in excuse for any struggles down the stretch. That’s not to say Davis deserves to be fired, just to acknowledge that the conversation will be put on hold.
However, Davis still has quite a bit to prove coaching around this injury, and morphing the identity of a team that has relied so heavily on its unique two-big lineups. Defensively, Wilson and Veesaar prevent opposing guards from attacking the rim and are the foundation on which the identity is built. But the same is true offensively.
UNC creates so much offense out of the two-man game between Veesaar and Wilson, running guards off staggered screens from the two bigs to begin actions that put defenders in a bind, especially with Veesaar’s ability to step out and knock down threes. With that element gone in the half-court and Wilson’s defense off the table, the Tar Heels will need to go all-in on up-tempo and try to win a shootout in every game without the superstar freshman.
The problem, or one of the many, is that in those 16 minutes and 28 possessions, the five-man lineup of Dixon, Trimble, Bogavac, Stevenson, and Veesaar has produced a 90.9 offensive rating, which is in the first percentile in the country this year. Of the team’s lineups that have played at least 20 possessions together, it is the worst, and the closest is the five-man group of Kyan Evans, Trimble, Bogavac, Wilson, and Veesaar, at 102.5, which is nearly 12 points better per 100 possessions.
It’s not that there is any inherent flaw with the Dixon, Trimble, Bogavac, Stevenson, Veesaar lineup. It has ample shooting, good size, and the ability to play with pace. It probably just needs time together, but with seven games left in the regular season, UNC can’t afford to ride out growing pains. Davis needs to make that group work and do so quickly.