Hubert Davis should be regretting reckless Caleb Wilson decision after injury update

If Caleb Wilson has played his final game for North Carolina, his Tar Heels career came to a brutal end on Tuesday night. Returning in the second half with a wrap on his hand after a first-half injury, Wilson missed his final two shots as he desperately tried to drag his team back in the final minutes of a 75-66 loss to Miami. 

Following the game, Hubert Davis told the media that “there is no situation” regarding Wilson’s injury, and when asked if it had an impact on his performance, Davis dismissively replied, “not to my knowledge.” A day later, Davis update that media that Wilson had a sprained wrist, then on Thursday, the news broke that Wilson has a broken hand. 

There is no timeline set for Wilson’s return, but with his status as a top NBA draft prospect cemented, there’s a high likelihood that he won’t be returning to the court. North Carolina has seven regular-season games remaining, then the ACC Tournament and presumably the NCAA Tournament after that. 

There are 53 days until the National Championship Game, which doesn’t leave a lot of time, and that’s the longest possible timeline, one that doesn’t seem feasible without the star freshman. 

Caleb Wilson should have never gone back into the game vs. Miami

The statement released by UNC stated that “Wilson is out with a fracture in his left hand, an injury he suffered in the first half of Tuesday’s game at Miami.”

So why did he return? Well, as the statement continued, “X-rays taken during the game were negative… but additional imaging done in Chapel Hill revealed the fracture.” 

That’s not necessarily to say the injury was exacerbated after Wilson’s return. Small fractures, especially in an area like that hand with many bones, can be hard to identify on a simple X-ray and often require an MRI to be located. Naturally, Wilson would have to wait until later in the week to get such imaging done and identify the injury. 

However, it’s still fair to question Davis’s decision to send Wilson back out on the floor in the second half and keep him in the game when he was clearly compromised. The situation is made much worse by Davis’s complete dismissal of the idea that his star player could have been limited in the second half. 

Not only did Wilson return, but UNC continually fed the injured star late in the game, hoping his post-up shot-making could erase the deficit. Wilson finished with 12 points and had seven in the second half, but he missed his final five field goals and did not look comfortable just days after his most impressive shot-making display of the year in the first half against Duke. 

Davis’s decision to play Wilson may not have made his injury worse, and frankly, we’ll never know the consequences, but bringing him back when there was so much uncertainty around his status was reckless. In the future, Davis should be more careful not to let one regular-season game potentially jeopardize the rest of the season.