In third season leading UNC basketball, Hubert Davis using more of his bench than ever

Ten minutes into Friday night’s game, not only was North Carolina wearing its blue uniforms at home in a historical rarity, there were a lot of those blue uniforms on the floor early.

Seven different players had scored as the Tar Heels staked out a 13-point lead on UC Riverside. More notably, Hubert Davis had already gone nine deep on his bench. The next points were a Seth Trimble hammer dunk on Vladimer Slaridze to make the lead 15, while Zayden High made it a full 10 players off the bench.

Ten players?

In the first half of the first half?

Again?

The way things have gone this season, that’s become as normal as the blue jerseys were bizarre.

Suddenly, in Year 3, Davis has gone from running one of the shortest benches in the country, a notable divergence from his predecessor, to the middle of the pack, routinely giving 10 players regular minutes.

“They’ve earned it,” Davis said, simply.

This was notably true of the Tar Heels’ first two games, but three officially makes a trend after Friday’s 77-52 win over the Highlanders. After Armando Bacot’s 21 points, the next two leading scorers were Trimble and Jalen Washington with 11 each, both off the bench.

In Davis’ first two seasons, the Tar Heels were 348th (out of 358) and 360th (out of 363) nationally in bench minutes played, per KenPom.com. In the early returns this season, they’re 114th, a massive jump from complete and total outlier back across the median and mean.

It is a sign, perhaps, that Davis finally has a roster he’s comfortable with, from top to bottom. As much as he talked about the potential of Dontrez Styles and D’Marco Dunn, he never seemed confident in their ability to actually play. Washington looked great in a brief cameo when Armando Bacot was injured, but played no more than eight minutes in any game after that. Tyler Nickel played 10 minutes some nights, not at all on others.

But Styles and Dunn and Nickel and Puff Johnson, who did play regularly, are all gone. And Trimble and Washington have seen the court early in all three games so far this season, along with all the newcomers. Davis seems more attuned to this group and more curious to see what combinations flourish early in the season.

“We’re trying a lot of different lineups,” Bacot said. “A lot of guys are getting opportunities. ... It’s an opportunity we really didn’t have last year, to build our bench up and get them some reps.”

That was, of course, the Williams Way: to play nine, 10, 11, even 12 guys during the first portion of the season, even if it might have cost UNC a November or December game or two over the years, to tinker and experiment and audition. By January, he’d inevitably get his rotation down to eight or nine, although he was never shy to go deeper when needed.

Davis, in his first two seasons, relied heavily on seven or eight guys right off the hop and it never changed. His argument was always that if more players earned playing time in practice, he would play them. But it was also hard to reconcile his lineup decisions with two full, entire seasons of bad practices.

Now he’s had three full offseasons to put his stamp on the roster, and this season, he’s clearly comfortable with everyone. The holdovers, last year’s starters and little-used bench players alike. The transfers. The freshmen. They’ve all earned it.

“It’s really just the competitiveness in practice,” Washington said. “Everybody’s getting better. Everybody wants to play. We’re seeing it in practice and you’re seeing the impact on the game.”

While the deeper rotation has become the norm, wearing the blues at home is not. UC Riverside requested to wear its whites — it has for every game this season, home or road — and UNC agreed.

“I was definitely confused,” Bacot said. “But I’m not mad at it.”

It was the fourth time since 1990 they’ve done it at home. The others: Those awful practice jerseys Nike made Duke and UNC wear in 2020; “Blue Year’s Eve” vs. UNC Wilmington on Dec. 31, 2013; and against Connecticut in 1990 as part of a doubleheader with Wake Forest and Villanova, randomly enough.

Davis played for UNC in that game, part of the ill-fated ACC-Big East Challenge, a battle won that year by the Big East 6-2 although the ACC won the war when it started treating the Big East like a football Ikea a decade and change later. He didn’t hesitate when asked about it. He didn’t even need to be prompted with the opponent.

“I remember everything,” Davis said. “It was the ACC-Big East Challenge and I didn’t shoot the ball very well at all. I wasn’t very good defensively. I remember I missed a 3 and Rick Fox got an offensive rebound dunk. It was a comeback, because they were cooking us and we came back and won.”

Davis was 2-for-8 from the floor (but 6-for-6 from the line). Barry Jacobs, writing for the New York Times, credited North Carolina’s “superior depth” for the UNC comeback from 12 down while Caulton Tudor in The News & Observer noted “(Dean) Smith used 13 players and eight scored.”

Friday, Davis used 13 players. Ten scored.

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