UNC Basketball gets huge boost with reclassification of point guard Elliot Cadeau

After losing Caleb Love, Leaky Black, and others, UNC Basketball got a huge boost with the reclassification of highly touted point guard Elliot Cadeau.

Think of the greatest UNC Basketball teams over the course of the program’s illustrious history, and one commonality can be found: an elite point guard. While Penn State may be “Linebacker U” when it comes to college football, there’s no doubt that the title of “Point Guard U” in college basketball belongs to North Carolina.

The list of floor generals that have called Chapel Hill home is long and distinguished. Phil Ford, Jimmy Black, Kenny Smith, Derrick Phelps, Ed Cota, Raymond Felton, Ty Lawson, Marcus Paige, Joel Berry. That’s a ridiculous collection of talent, with five national championships between them.

Being the “next in line” of a list like that is a tall task, but UNC’s immediate outlook is a whole lot rosier now that highly touted point guard Elliot Cadeau has reclassified for the 2023-24 season. The move has been speculated about for months, but now that it has become a reality, it provides a real shot in the arm to a Tar Heel program that is still trying to swallow the bitter pill of a season in which everything went wrong.

The Heels reached the 2022 Final Four in large part due to the outstanding play of their dynamic duo in the backcourt, RJ Davis and Caleb Love. While both were phenomenal during UNC’s run, neither player fit neatly into the traditional point guard mold. Love was always more of a shooting guard, while Davis has always been a combo guard. The pair wasn’t able to transcend that odd fit this past season, as the Heels shockingly missed the tournament altogether.

With Love transferring out of Chapel Hill and committing to Arizona after things unexpectedly went south with Michigan, it was assumed that point guard duties would fall completely to Davis and sophomore Seth Trimble, a proposition that made Tar Heel fans uneasy. Trimble displayed promise at times during his freshman campaign, but his biggest contributions were on the defensive end. He often looked tentative with the ball in his hands, finishing the year with a paltry 1.8 points and .6 assists per game.

It wasn’t just Trimble that struggled, as the Tar Heels offense seemed to be fighting itself all season. Distributing the basketball was a point of particular tribulation, as the Heels finished a ghastly 312th in the country in assist rate. That should all change with the addition of Cadeau.

Even before Tuesday’s announcement, Cadeau has been turning heads. He led Link Academy to a 27-1 record and the GEICO Nationals championship, racking up 29 assists in the event’s three games. He then led the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League in assists, averaging 9.3 per game (50% more than the second-highest assist total). More than just a distributor, he filled out the rest of the box score, averaging 15.7 points and 4.8 rebounds on 50% shooting.

Cadeau figures to get all the minutes he can handle on a UNC team desperate for a vintage point guard. He’ll join fellow freshmen Simeon Wilcher and Zayden High, plus one of the country’s highest-ranked transfer classes, in trying to remake the Tar Heels in head coach Hubert Davis’ third season at the helm.

Together with the offseason hire of UNC legend Marcus Paige as director of team and player development, Cadeau’s reclassification presents a dream scenario for Carolina fans that wax nostalgic for the days of seeing the boys in blue run up and down the court and thank the passer. RJ Davis and All-American Armando Bacot will deservedly get much of the attention as the season approaches, but Cadeau could quickly remind fans that Carolina is at its best when it has a first-rate point guard running the show.