UNC freshman Elliot Cadeau keeps rising to the moment. Now, the stakes grow even higher

There’s an alternate reality for Elliot Cadeau, as there is for us all, in which everything is much different for him if not for a moment he seized, an opportunity he didn’t allow to pass. Without it, he’s perhaps not at North Carolina right now, and the Tar Heels are without the truest point guard they’ve had in years.

They’re likely not in the midst of the kind of season they’re having, in that world. And Cadeau is still in Missouri, at the school his parents had to bribe him to go to, at first, with the promise of some new headphones, and the allowance of a tattoo and a curfew when he’d come home for visits. In that version of life, one that was the plan, for a while, Cadeau is still waiting for his time.

Instead it is here, and now. Cadeau is the Tar Heels’ emergent freshman point guard, already drawing comparisons to some of the best to ever do it at that position at UNC, and UNC is in the middle of its best regular season in years. And these things are very much connected — Cadeau’s arrival and the Tar Heels’ success; the latter not as likely, at least not like this, without the former.

The first three months of his first college season have been a proving ground, with Cadeau continuing to pass tests that have increased in difficulty. He had to learn to come off the bench, at first, which is something he’d never had to do. He had to learn to defend at this level. He had to learn no shortage of lessons, some that are impossible to teach in practice or during a film session.

The passing ability — well, everyone expected that to be the easy part, and Cadeau has often made it look that way, with a vision and wizardry that hasn’t been seen in Chapel Hill, with this much consistency, in about a decade. And now, approaching UNC’s game against Duke on Saturday, Cadeau has further expanded his game and become more of a scoring threat, too.

If there’d been a checklist of questions about Cadeau three months ago, around the start of November, about everything that awaited — whether he could quickly earn the trust of coaches and teammates; whether his passing acumen was as good as advertised; whether he could grasp UNC’s offense; whether he could and would embrace the little things — the answers would be all the same.

Check. Big yes. Yes. Yes. All yeses, all the way through.

As a result, UNC has undergone a transformation of its own. The Tar Heels entered Hubert Davis’ third season as head coach with almost a sense of desperation and, if that’s a tad strong, then they at least felt a yearning — and the pressure — to restore the program to its usual place. A year ago, UNC became the first team to begin a season No. 1 and miss the NCAA tournament.

A spoiled fanbase grumbled. By the end of a long season, Davis looked defeated. UNC turned down an NIT bid, as if to suggest it was too good for such a thing, and Davis and his staff entered a critical few months of rapid rebuilding. The result was the addition of five transfers and two freshmen — one of whom, Cadeau, decided to reclassify and graduate high school a year early.

In that decision, there was a clear subtext on either side. For Cadeau, it was a declaration of his self-assurance; he believed he was ready for everything to come. For Davis, it was a statement of need and perhaps hope. Maybe Cadeau was the missing piece. Maybe he could fill a void that encumbered UNC during Davis’ first two uneven seasons as head coach.

Cadeau’s road to Chapel Hill, via Sweden

Cadeau’s ascent and transformation — that from heralded, next-big-thing prospect to the actualization of the promise — began about a year ago, thousands of miles from his New Jersey home and mostly out of sight of even the most devoted followers of college basketball recruiting. It began in Europe, with one of the world’s most hard-luck national teams.

For years, Cadeau had been traveling to Sweden during the spring and summer for international competition with its national basketball program. His mom, Michelle, is Swedish — born and raised — and Cadeau embraced the thought of playing for his mother’s country. He went back and forth often, with hopes and dreams and a copious amount of Chick-fil-A’s Polynesian Sauce.

If the food wasn’t good during all that European travel, Michelle said, “at least he can pour some Chick-fil-A sauce on it.” In the summer of 2022, Cadeau just missed making the Swedish national team, which has never been all that formidable due to basketball’s place as a secondary (or even more off the radar) sport there.

Sweden is known for many things: its natural beauty; its harsh winters; the allure of its capital city of Stockholm. It is not, though, a basketball hotbed. Part of Cadeau’s motivation in playing for his mother’s country is to enhance the game’s place there, and to prove to younger people that basketball is a worthy athletic pursuit.

Before he made the national team in 2023, though, Cadeau first played a leading role for one of Sweden’s junior 18-and-under teams, leading it to prominence in competition throughout Europe. Then, last February, Cadeau earned a call-up. He made the senior national team — the one that would play in the Olympics, if it could qualify — and suddenly found himself alongside grown men; men with families and mortgages (presumably); overseas pros who made their livings off of basketball.

Cadeau was 18 and could’ve passed for younger, what with the baby face that’s sure to persist. He was still, the thought was then, more than a year away from playing college basketball. And suddenly there he was, practicing every day with the national team, playing against seasoned international veterans, earning respect in a group “full of pros,” he said recently.

And what did he learn?

That “I could hang with them,” he said. And with that realization came a belief.

Soon enough he was back at Link Academy, which has become one of the nation’s premier destinations for high school basketball talent. It’s nestled in the natural beauty of the Ozarks, in Branson, Missouri, and though the place has an enviable reputation, Cadeau did not necessarily want to go from the family home in West Orange, New Jersey, to the woods of Missouri.

That led to the request for the headphones, tattoo and new curfew.

“I get those three, I’m going to Link,” his mom recalled Cadeau saying, and a deal was a deal. He was off to Branson, new headphones and all. When he returned there from his international experience in February 2023, the basketball coach at Link, a former LSU assistant coach named Bill Armstrong, called Michelle.

“Something happened,” he told her, referencing Cadeau’s uncontained confidence.

Michelle soon got the story herself.

“He said, ‘Mom, I was out there — every single player on that court was a professional basketball player but me. And I was right there with them.’”

About three months later, Cadeau finalized the decision that set all of this in motion in Chapel Hill — UNC’s 9-0 start in ACC and the top-5 national ranking and the belief that the Tar Heels might just be a Final Four team. All of that, now, started with Cadeau’s decision last May. He was coming to college a year earlier than anticipated.

Stepping onto the UNC-Duke stage

In the days before his team’s game against Duke on Saturday, Davis attempted to downplay the reality that Cadeau was approaching another moment of proving — the reality that a UNC-Duke game brought another unfamiliar stage; another test. Davis shut off a question referencing it and began listing moments, as if to suggest that Saturday would be nothing new.

Cadeau and UNC, Davis argued, had played in a memorable environment against Tennessee at the Smith Center in late November. There was the game against Connecticut at Madison Square Garden in early December. Even the defeat earlier in the week at Georgia Tech, where Yellow Jackets fans stormed the court in jubilation at the buzzer.

“That environment was pretty good,” Davis said.

Perhaps. But nothing in the regular season compares to all that surrounds a Duke-UNC game, either in Chapel Hill or Durham. There’s nothing like it in the sport. A single game against Duke will not necessarily define any UNC player, or vice versa. But there’s always the potential that a moment will live on, forever.

Fifty years later at UNC, they still replay the shot Walter Davis (Hubert’s uncle) made in an all-time comeback against Duke in 1974. They still replay the clip of a bloody Eric Montross in 1992. And Marvin Williams’ putback in 2005. And they replay those scenes because of who UNC was playing at the time, and because of the stage. And now it’s Cadeau’s turn to take a leading role upon it.

“For Elliot, it’s really tough to tell a freshman what to expect going into this game,” said Armando Bacot, the Tar Heels’ fifth-year forward and elder statesman, and he could recall what it was like when he was a first-year player, and a bit overwhelmed by the moment.

So could RJ Davis, the senior guard whose emergence as the leading candidate for ACC Player of the Year is due, in large part, to the freedom afforded by playing alongside the purest point guard UNC has had in a while.

RJ Davis’ first game against Duke came during the 2020-21 season, around the height of the pandemic. There was barely anyone inside Cameron Indoor Stadium when UNC played at Duke that season, and yet still it was nerve-wracking, he said, just being on that stage without ever having stepped onto it. Davis said he planned to share some wisdom with Cadeau on Wednesday afternoon, a little guard-to-guard powwow, senior to freshman.

The message was to be simple: not to get caught up in it. Maybe easier said than done.

“Just go out there and be Elliot,” RJ Davis said, “because that’s what we need from him. And I think he’s played really well for us and the way he’s been playing, his aggressiveness, his playmaking. Even his defense has been working for us.”

The Hubert Davis draw

Defense was among those questions that followed Cadeau into college, along with ones about his shot and his ability to withstand the pressure and hype that envelop any prodigious athlete these days, but seem to especially coalesce around basketball players. An entire online ecosystem has sprung up around top prospects, setting expectations and narratives long before college.

Cadeau was hardly immune. Already a top-15 prospect in the high school graduating class of 2024, his decision to reclassify set expectations into overdrive. Some viewed him as a guaranteed one-and-done, straight-to-the-NBA kind of player. Hubert Davis was as high on Cadeau as anyone, though grounded during his recruitment.

There were no promises, Michelle Cadeau said, and in a world of endless talk of smoke-blowing in recruiting, the Cadeaus found Davis’ approach refreshing. It was a successful defense, too, of the way other schools tried to attack UNC. Cadeau and his parents heard all the usual criticisms — that Davis and UNC “don’t produce one and done,” Michelle said.

That “they don’t develop players.” That was the messaging, she said, “from a lot of other colleges.”

Davis didn’t try to match the bluster. Instead, Michelle said, “Coach Hubert never promised Elliot anything. No starting spot. No this, no that. Nothing. He said, ‘I play the best players.’

“And Elliot really, really, really liked Coach Hubert.”

Becoming UNC’s point guard

If Cadeau has felt any pressure a little more than midway through his freshman season, it has likely come more from within, from the reality of his position. Point guard at North Carolina is inarguably one of the most high-profile and unforgiving positions in college basketball. It comes with visibility that might not be unusual, compared to other prominent programs throughout the ACC.

What makes it different, though, is the standard.

Starting at point guard at UNC is not unlike being the quarterback at Notre Dame or Alabama or Michigan or anywhere else that’s accustomed to winning a lot, and doing it with a certain gravitas. There’s the history and legacy. There’s a line from Cadeau that stretches back in time to Phil Ford, and also connects the likes of Kenny Smith and Raymond Felton and Ty Lawson.

It includes Ed Cota, of the late 1990s, and Kendall Marshall and Marcus Paige and Joel Berry of the 2010s. Paige, who led the Tar Heels to the brink of a national championship in 2016, is in his first season back as a member of Davis’ staff, and has become a mentor for Cadeau.

Roy Williams, the former UNC head coach who hired Davis and gave him his start in coaching, always had a special relationship with his point guards, an unspoken sort of bond and trust. Some of them he liked to call “tough little nuts” for their resiliency or tenacity or leadership ability, or all of the above, and Davis learned under Williams for about a decade.

Perhaps it was fitting, then, that the first word Davis used to describe Cadeau earlier this week was something of a throwback to the way Williams used to talk about his favorite point guards. All that was missing was the inclusion of “little nut” delivered in a North Carolina mountain drawl.

“For Elliot, there’s many things that I loved about him from the start,” said Davis, who made Cadeau a recruiting priority early into his young head coaching tenure, and here came that first word: “His toughness ...”

The greatest of UNC’s point guards all had it, mentally perhaps most of all. Davis continued to explain the characteristics that stood out, beyond Cadeau’s toughness — “his commitment to winning, how he celebrates the success of his teammates even more than his success.

“Obviously his passing ability and and his ability to be able to get to the rim and finish make others better,” Davis went on. “He’s always been about team and that’s something that I’ve always wanted in a player, that just naturally puts team first and that’s what Elliot does every day.”

That part of it always came naturally, Michelle said. She and her husband used to have to yell at Elliot to shoot instead of pass all the time, when he was still learning how to play. The unselfishness, she said, came to be his “superpower” — one that has helped ease his transition.

Not that there haven’t been difficult teaching moments. There have, instead, been many.

And now a crash course in college basketball becomes more daunting. For Cadeau and UNC, the most difficult tests are to come; with a program’s pursuit of redemption, after last season, in part on the shoulders and in the hands of a player who is experiencing this, and everything, for the first time, and thriving, still.