Offseason roster turnover gives reason for Triangle hoops optimism ... again
We all fell for it last summer, didn’t we? What looked like the most promising college basketball season in the Triangle in years ended up something less than that.
N.C State fell so hard from the Final Four it got its coach fired. North Carolina squeaked into the NCAA tournament as the last team in the field. And Duke made it to the Final Four with Cooper Flagg et al, but those last 35 seconds certainly put a different spin on the season.
Certainly, we’ve all learned our lesson. But what about the roster Will Wade has bought, legally, at N.C. State? What about all the new players North Carolina’s new general manager has brought in? What about Duke having a second generation of Boozers?
It all seems pretty promising for June. Can’t wait for that State-Carolina game in Chapel Hill! What? Oh.
In short: We’ve learned nothing. Let’s go fall for it again, because there is reason to believe this could be the most promising college basketball season in the Triangle in years.
In Bart Torvik’s continually updated preseason projections, Duke is third, North Carolina is 15th and N.C. State is 37th, well within the margin of error for all three to make the NCAA tournament. (The margin of error is large; Duke’s roster still includes Tyrese Proctor and UNC’s includes Drake Powell.) The Wolfpack even projects as the fourth-best team in the ACC — Louisville is third — which suggests we may be in for another long season of mediocrity elsewhere in the ACC and, again, a race to four teams in the NCAA tournament, meager and shameful as that would be.
Now, a lot can happen over the next nine months. Just ask N.C. State how it felt about things a year ago. But in this new, transactional, semi-pro world of college hoops, the events that have the most impact on a team’s competitiveness happen between March and June — and some transfers can swing the numbers two ways, like Ven-Allen Lubin jumping from North Carolina to N.C. State, his fourth college — so you can actually get a decent handle on where teams stand based on past performance and player projections.
Duke has the Boozer twins, Cameron and Cayden, leading the usual cast of freshman celebrities along with returnees Isaiah Evans, Caleb Foster and Maliq Brown, among others. North Carolina has star freshman Caleb Wilson, a handful of veteran transfers and a 21-year-old Montenegrin to go with Seth Trimble. And N.C. State brings back only one contributor, sophomore Paul McNeil, but got impact players like Darrion Williams and Tre Holloman out of the portal before Lubin Ubered to the other side of the area code.
There’s a lot to like about all of those moves, including how much they cost, which is a really weird thing to write. The spending on basketball in the Triangle this spring, undisclosed but believed to be competitive nationally, was very much a statement of intent, a commitment to do battle at the upper levels of the sport, from all three schools in a way that isn’t unanimously true across the bloated sprawl of the ACC.
A high payroll is no guarantee of success, as professional sports have long taught us, but a low one is often a guarantee of failure. Duke, North Carolina and N.C. State are all fully committed to the sport now, especially with the arrival of Wade at the Wolfpack and agent Jim Tanner to general-manage UNC’s roster.
And while Jon Scheyer can still bask in the glow of getting to his first Final Four at Duke, no matter how the last minute went, and Wade will get a honeymoon season he might not even need, there will never be more pressure on Hubert Davis in Chapel Hill to get the Tar Heels back to their traditional perch among the sport’s elite and far away from the bubble.
There will be a whole lot of new faces, but also a whole lot of talent, so there’s also reason to be optimistic about the season ahead. For real, this time.
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This story was originally published June 6, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Offseason roster turnover gives reason for Triangle hoops optimism ... again."
