North Carolina Basketball: No Kevin Knox for Tar Heels, what now?

Power Forward

Starter – Garrison Brooks OR Luke Maye

In the post, there is more hedging. The Brooks versus Maye debate is one of best case versus worst case scenario.

In the best case, Coach Williams gets Bradley back and decides to play his conventional two post offense with Brooks as the other post. Kenny Williams makes enough threes that there is no need to play more of Luke than the normal rotation would allow. That is the best case.

The worst case is that whether Bradley returns or not, Coach Williams can’t derive enough shooting out of Kenny Williams and Pinson. That forces him to use Maye more and insert him into the starting lineup. This is probably more true without Bradley, since it is assumed that getting the ball to Bradley would be the first concern of the Tar Heel offense.

Brooks signed on May 1, so he’s official now. He is the highest rated of the big men signees that Williams has gathered so far this year. Like Felton, although not to as high a degree, there is a lot that we simply do not know about the Auburn High product. It should be telling that he did back out of a LOI to Mississippi State to come to UNC.

Of course there will be a lot of local support for Maye after his Tournament run. He was the MOP in the Memphis regional. However, he also was pretty useless against Gonzaga in the title game. He will never really escape that tweener status of his. Fortunately there are not many Gonzagas out there in the world of college basketball these days.

Backups – Maye, Brooks, Sterling Manley, Brandon Huffman

There is a lot of unknown on the Tar Heel big man bench. A normal Williams rotation uses three, four, but no more than five bigs. The fifth guy is usually a small time defensive specialist the way Desmond Hubert was. The only way we know that Roy is not convinced about these guys is that the Heels were still talking to transfer Jack Whitman before he signed with Kansas.