Improved Guard Play Necessary
For 2026 Tar Heels To Truly Thrive
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated Jan. 21, 2025)
While the first half of North Carolina’s 2025-26 basketball season showcased a fun variety of exceptional new talents, highlight-reel moments and résumé-building victories, it also raised some fair questions about the team’s down-the-stretch potential.
Newcomer Caleb Wilson is one of the best players in college basketball. The 6-foot-10, 215-pound forward is on pace (at about 20 points per game) to become just the fifth freshman ever to lead the Tar Heels in scoring, and that fact merely scratches the surface of his broad-based value to the squad.
Transfer Henri Veesaar also has established himself as a major difference-maker for Carolina. After starting only five games during his three years at Arizona, the 7-0, 225-pound center has started all 18 of the Tar Heels’ contests, helped his new team achieve a Top 25 national ranking, firmly established himself as another (with Wilson) prominent All-Atlantic Coast Conference candidate, and entered the conversation as another potential first-round professional draft pick.
UNC recently returned from its disappointing West Coast road trip with a solid 14-4 record and a #22 national ranking.
The Tar Heels’ nonconference victories over Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio State should bolster their résumé come Selection Sunday, although it certainly would help if the Jayhawks, Wildcats and Buckeyes played their way into (or back into) the Top 25 over the next two months.
Meanwhile, the Heels’ backcourt — opposing guards have absolutely torched Carolina thus far in ACC play — looms as the team’s lingering X factor in the coming weeks and months.
When the Tar Heels recently traveled to SMU, which has one of the ACC’s most experienced and effective backcourts (led by senior guards Boopie Miller, BJ Edwards and Jaron Pierre Jr.) this season, they played their worst game of the campaign.
SMU’s starting guards dominated UNC’s starting guards (Kyan Evans, Luka Bogavac and Seth Trimble) — repeatedly beating them off the dribble offensively, destroying their rhythm defensively, and ultimately outscoring them by a 55-33 margin in the Mustangs’ 97-83 victory.
“They’re really quick,” UNC coach Hubert Davis said of the Mustangs. “Their athleticism, especially from their guard position, is real. Not just their athleticism, but their length and physicality. I felt like it affected us.”
Led by Trimble, a 6-3, 200-pound senior with amazing athleticism and high-level intensity, Carolina previously had played solid perimeter defense for most of the season.
Even with Trimble missing nine games from mid-November through mid-December, prior to the team’s recent visits to Stanford and Cal, UNC opponents had converted only 30.9 percent of their 3-point attempts; if that number had stayed below 32.1 percent, it would have ranked as the best of the five-year Davis era.
Instead, UNC’s most recent four-game stretch in ACC play — a win over Wake Forest, and losses to Cal, SMU and Stanford — gave them the worst defensive numbers in conference competition, including league opponents’ ridiculous 45 percent success rate from 3-point land.
Clearly, Trimble (15 ppg) needs more help from his backcourt friends, both offensively and defensively.
Luka Bogavac, a 22-year-old guard from Montenegro who played professionally in the Adriatic League for the past two years, arrived in the United States with a reputation as a sharpshooter. He has struggled with the quickness and physicality of many NCAA defenders, though, and his scoring average (9.6 ppg) and 3-point shooting accuracy (31 percent) have dropped. He often has been a step slow defensively, too.
Junior Kyan Evans, a Colorado State transfer, has provided solid ball-handling (team-high 59 assists, 28 turnovers) during his first season in Chapel Hill, but he doesn’t push or distribute the ball as well as most UNC starting point guards (the Tar Heels are playing at their slowest adjusted tempo since coach Bill Guthridge’s final team, in 1999-2000), and Evans’ smaller frame (6-2, 175) can be a liability defensively. His offensive production (5.6 ppg, 31 percent 3-pointers) typically has been limited, too, with his 3.3 assists per game ranking just 16th in the league.
Sophomore Jonathan Powell, freshman Derek Dixon (recently elevated into a starting role for the first time) and junior Jaydon Young have offered some help in the backcourt off the bench.
A West Virginia transfer, Powell is averaging 4.9 points per game and hitting 35 percent of his 3-point attempts, and he rarely turns the ball over. Dixon, who offers good size (6-5, 200) for a point guard, is handling the ball well (37 assists, 15 turnovers), averaging 5.2 points per game and converting almost 40 percent of his 3-point tries (best among Carolina’s rotation guards). A Virginia Tech transfer, Young had 11 double-digit scoring efforts (seven in ACC games) for the Hokies last season, but he has struggled defensively for the Heels, and his only major offensive output (12 points; 3-5 on 3-pointers) came in UNC’s recent 87-84 win over Wake Forest.
While it hasn’t occurred since 2012, UNC has had plenty of years — as with this year’s group — when the team’s top two (and occasionally three) scorers were forwards and/or centers.
That theme wasn’t a problem in 2011 or 2012, under coach Roy Williams, when Carolina’s top three scorers (in both seasons) were forward Harrison Barnes and post players John Henson and Tyler Zeller. (Nobody else averaged even nine points per game.) With backcourt support from point guard Kendall Marshall, wing guard Reggie Bullock and others, those Tar Heels averaged about 30 victories, won back-to-back ACC regular-season championships and made back-to-back trips to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight.
The same theme applied to both of coach Dean Smith’s national championship teams.
In 1982, Carolina’s top scorers were junior forward James Worthy and sophomore center Sam Perkins, with the backcourt support provided mainly by steady senior Jimmy Black and a legend-in-the-making freshman named Michael Jordan. In 1993, the top scorers were junior center Eric Montross and senior forward George Lynch, with the backcourt help led by steady junior point guard Derrick Phelps and sharpshooting sophomore wing Donald Williams.
Occasionally, though, when UNC’s best players were all forwards and centers, and then the backcourt never developed into a stable supporting cast, disaster has struck.
In 2010, when the Tar Heels’ top scorers were forward Deon Thompson, center Ed Davis and forward Will Graves, UNC missed the NCAA Tournament and finished 20-17. (The only other Williams-coached UNC team that didn’t play in the Big Dance came in 2020, when there was no Big Dance because of COVID.) In 2002, under coach Matt Doherty, when the Heels’ top scorers were forwards Jason Capel, Kris Lang and Jawad Williams, they had the worst season (8-20 and tied for last in the ACC) in the history of the program.
This 2026 Carolina squad appears to have championship-caliber big men in Wilson and Veesaar.
The only way this year’s Tar Heels will accomplish anything truly special, though, is if their guards can provide more reliable support from now through March than they have to this point in the season.
