Hubert Davis didn’t need redemption — but his UNC basketball team providing one, anyway

Around this time two years ago, Hubert Davis led North Carolina to what was then the most memorable victory of his head coaching tenure, the one that spoiled Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game at Duke. It proved to be a catalyst for the Tar Heels’ unlikely run to the Final Four and, when the Tar Heels earned their way there, Davis cried during a nationally televised postgame interview.

Then his team beat Duke, again, ending Krzyzewski’s career, and UNC came within a half of winning the 2022 national championship. Despite that defeat against Kansas on the final Monday night of the season, the Tar Heels’ run that March and early April will remain one of the most celebrated in school history. It was a pretty good finish to Davis’ first season as a head coach.

Around this time a year ago, it was as if none of that had ever happened. Not beating Duke at Duke in Krzyzewski’s final home game, in front of legions of his former players. Not ending his career in the Final Four. Not the overall NCAA Tournament run, that had Davis crying joyful tears and UNC fans lauding him.

The Tar Heels toiled through a miserable 2022-23 season. They became the first team, since the NCAA Tournament expanded in 1985, to miss the tournament after starting a season No. 1. Davis became a target of ire, with social media and message boards turning even more toxic than usual. Narratives took hold. Davis couldn’t coach. The 2022 run was a fluke. He was destined to fail.

And what do they say now?

A more boastful man might have embraced the opportunity Davis received here Thursday, when asked whether he felt a sense of vindication. UNC on Saturday will take another trip to Duke, its second since that victory in ‘22, but first since then that comes at the end of the regular season. And it’s always those season-ending games at Cameron Indoor Stadium that feel a little different.

The energy level always feels a little higher. The noise, too.

There always seems to be stakes when Duke and Carolina meet in early March, and that’ll be no different Saturday. UNC, with a victory, can win outright the ACC regular season championship. Duke, meanwhile, still has a chance to win a share of it. The Tar Heels will enter Cameron Indoor in the midst of their best regular season in five years, with a one-game lead in the ACC.

But, vindication? Davis didn’t exactly take the bait on Thursday.

For Hubert Davis, belief is part of his identity

What he did, instead, was offer thanks. For the good. For the not-so good.

If UNC fans were disappointed by last season, imagine how Davis felt. The nephew of Walter Davis, who remains among the best ever to play at UNC, Hubert Davis grew up dreaming of playing in Chapel Hill. He wasn’t necessarily a heralded prospect and had to convince Dean Smith to give him a chance. He became one of the great four-year success stories in school history.

When Davis became UNC’s head coach his predecessor, Roy Williams, spoke with conviction about Davis being the right choice. The only choice, as Williams made it sound. Davis’ first season offered proof. Then came his second. The defeats weighed on him as the season slipped away. Davis’ optimism belied the turmoil, though the look in his eyes, the body language, told the story.

Davis kept waiting for a turnaround that never came. He kept believing, without much evidence toward the end of the season that there was reason for belief. But that’s what faith is, and Davis’ has been strong since he lost his mother to cancer during his college years.

“I really believe this,” Davis said Thursday. “There is a reason — and these are my beliefs — there is a reason for all seasons.”

He began speaking of Jesus — “He is the reason for all seasons,” Davis said — and lessons. And how, whether “it’s a sunny day or a cloudy day,” the reasons behind those days, the lessons therein, are always good. Even when they don’t feel like it.

“And the person that I am today, the coach that I am today, was because of the good reasons from year one and year two,” Davis said. “And I really believe that. Last year was a blessing. I am a better person and a better coach because of last year.

“And that’s the way I believe.”

The belief is part of his identity. There are no wild stories of Davis’ decade-plus career in the NBA; no tales of late nights on the town or escapades. There was, though, the observation Damon Stoudamire, the first-year Georgia Tech coach, shared about Davis earlier this season, during one of the ACC’s weekly teleconferences. Stoudamire during his second NBA season briefly played alongside Davis, on the 1996-97 Toronto Raptors.

And “the one thing about Hubert, and you didn’t see this a lot in the NBA,” Stoudamire said, “and this is not a knock, I’m just saying ... you know, Hubert, on the bus, he read his Bible every single day. We’re on the road, on the way to a game, Hubert read his Bible. You know, he’s always been the same, he’s an even-keeled man.”

Redemption, and rebuilding

The act of redemption, meanwhile, is rooted in religion and full of spiritual undertones. In Christianity it means, generally, to be delivered from sin, and to achieve salvation through such overcoming. Davis undoubtedly appreciates that definition of the word more than its more casual application and, besides, another UNC basketball team is already known for its supposed redemption.

And yet the word never quite fit the 2016-17 Tar Heels, who won the national championship the year after the 2016 team suffered one of the most agonizing defeats in college basketball history. The 2016 team didn’t need redemption, or redeeming; there was no shame in losing how it did, on the receiving end of Kris Jenkins’ shot at the buzzer that gave Villanova the national championship.

There was no sin there — except maybe defensively in allowing Jenkins too much space. If redemption can be used in sports, it’s a much stronger fit for this UNC team, for the Tar Heels of a season ago did need redeeming. So disappointing was last season that, by the end of it, there was a sense of gratitude that it was over. The Tar Heels turned down an NIT bid, and Davis, the caretaker of a program he’d adored since childhood, embarked on a rebuilding.

The roster turnover was dramatic. Caleb Love, among others, left. Harrison Ingram and three others transferred in. Elliot Cadeau, a prized point guard prospect, graduated high school a year early to enroll. Armando Bacot and RJ Davis returned.

“There was a lot at stake for all of us this year,” Bacot said Thursday, and everybody understood.

Blocking out ‘the noise’

Bacot, a fifth-year senior, has become something of a program ambassador, his role as a UNC cheerleader and promoter almost as significant as the one he plays on the court. He’s also a voracious reader of mean tweets, or social media in general, and after a game earlier this season he acknowledged, without shame, that he sees everything.

Around this time a year ago, there was a lot to read, much of it nasty. Bacot and his teammates routinely found themselves the recipients of online roastings from irate fans. Davis, meanwhile, underwent the digital version of being hung in effigy, as Dean Smith had experienced in analog early in his head coaching tenure at UNC.

“I mean, you see the tweets,” Bacot said. “Like, I have a bad game, they kill me. Coach Davis has a bad game, they call for his job. Just crazy stuff like that. But like I said, playing at a university like this, you’ve got a lot of emotional fans and people that want to win, which they deserve.

“But we all know coach Davis is a great coach and (will) be one of the greatest coaches, I think, of all time. So everything takes time.”

That Bacot is such a consumer of online discourse, however absurd it might be, must drive Davis a little mad. He’s always telling his players to block out “the noise” — good and bad — and that’s “one thing I love about coach Davis,” RJ Davis said Thursday. “... and I think he does a great job of doing it, himself.”

“You’re always going to receive noise, whether it’s praise or criticism, and you can never control that,” RJ went on. Of his head coach, in particular, he said, “The way he’s dealt with it — I mean, I have a lot of respect for him.

“I don’t see why the criticism comes, but that’s something you can’t control.”

‘I don’t know it all’

The things Hubert Davis can control have largely worked out this season. It’s almost as though he remembered how to coach. Or, more likely, that all the noise that surrounded him a year ago was unjustified; that UNC needed the roster reset that arrived; that, yes, Davis needed to learn some things, too.

His third UNC team has by far been his best, defensively. He has unlocked RJ Davis, who has become the frontrunner for ACC Player of the Year honors. He is using his bench at least a little bit more than he did in his first two seasons, though still at a rate that ranks among the lowest in the country (No. 335, according to kenpom.com).

Hubert Davis has now been a head coach for 102 games. He labored on Thursday to answer a question about how he’d changed from his first one; about what he’d learned and how he’d grown. It was the sort of question, requiring some self-reflection, that Davis doesn’t necessarily love — at least not with a game at Duke looming.

“I mean, I just ... anything that you do, the more times that you do it, I think you become more comfortable,” he said. “You see the things that you enjoy, the things that you like, the things that you don’t like, the things that you may need to alter or tweak or adjust.

“I’ve always said that I love being in a position of listening and learning. I’ve never felt like, whether I was a player or an assistant coach or an analyst where I felt like I was ‘there’ — I know it all. And obviously, three years in, I don’t know it all.”

That will come as no surprise to the army of amateur experts who were so eager, a year ago, to question just about everything about Davis, including whether he was the right choice for the job. Strangely, it has been quieter this season, with UNC having secured at least a share of a conference championship; with the Tar Heels a near-lock to be at least a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Given his faith, Davis didn’t need or ask for a redemption, basketball or otherwise. His team has provided him with one, anyway.