When looking at the current 2025-26 UNC basketball roster, nothing jumps off the page as certain to be spectacular.
Ian Jackson is the only UNC basketball freshman of the Hubert Davis era to average over 10 points per game. The outbound transfer, a former five-star McDonald’s All-American, averaged only 11.9 points while seeing both a rise and dip in his usage during the season.
As was the case with Jackson last year, five-star McDonald’s All-American forward Caleb Wilson is set to arrive in Chapel Hill this summer after becoming a top-10 prep in his cycle. And a few experts have projected Wilson to begin the season where Jackson sat last November: outside the starting five.
“I don’t know if North Carolina is a tournament team right now,” The Field of 68’s Rob Dauster said on Thursday.
On top of two four-star rookie guards and the confirmed returns of two scholarship players, including only one part-time starter from the 2024-25 squad in rising senior guard Seth Trimble, the Tar Heels boast a handful of solid transfer additions.
However, only one of those portal newcomers is a consensus top 100 transfer this cycle in former three-year Arizona center Henri Veesaar. And the rising redshirt junior, UNC’s projected starter down low, hasn’t even quite posted double-digit points per game in a season as a collegian yet and just made his first career start back in February.
In short, the fifth roster under Hubert Davis’ command lacks surefire superstars on the college stage.
Now sitting outside several sites’ projected top 25, the collection just isn’t the caliber of what many Tar Heel supporters were hoping to see built this offseason in response to UNC’s near NCAA Tournament miss last season, which followed the program’s long list of big whiffs in the 2024 portal.
