When North Carolina guard Caleb Love announced his intention to transfer this past Monday, it was hard not to address the elephant in the room: Is Love’s departure addition by subtraction?

Even typing that feels bizarre.

It isn’t every day that a team loses its leading scorer and a program folk hero and you legitimately wonder whether it’s a good thing, but what about North Carolina basketball hasn’t felt bizarre over the past 5 months. The postmortems on one of the most disappointing seasons in not only North Carolina basketball, but college basketball, history, are still being written, and the dialogue about this season will linger into at least ACC Media Days early next autumn. That’s to be expected when you become the first team since the NCAA Tournament field expanded to 64 in 1985 to be preseason No. 1 and not make the Big Dance. Questioning whether the program is better off without Love, just 12 months after “the shot?”

That’s what happens when you shoot 30% from the floor as a junior, 6 points worse than your sophomore year, you shoot 76% at the free throw line, a year after you connect on 87% of your charity shots, and your assist rate per 100 possessions drops more than 3 assists, from 19.6 to 16.4.

Love may have led the Tar Heels in scoring, but he was one of the league’s least efficient players, despite logging the 5th most minutes in the ACC. Love’s inability to hit shots and do a better job creating for teammates is, for better or worse, an easy scapegoat for “what went wrong” on a North Carolina team that finished just 50th in Adjusted Offensive Efficiency, per KenPom, and lingered closer to 100th offensively over the season’s final month, per Bart Torvik.

The Tar Heels improved defensively late in the season, especially after Hubert Davis finally acknowledged that Pete Nance was not Brady Manek, and he moved the Northwestern big closer to the basket on both ends, preventing blowbys that either led to easy buckets or disrupted Carolina’s help rotations. It was Love’s struggles, and the inability to score, whether you blame scheme or a lack of shooters or both, that sealed Carolina’s fate, especially in vital bubble-breaking losses late in the season to Miami and Duke in Chapel Hill and Virginia at the ACC Tournament.

Now Love, along with his high-risk, tough-shot-loving, high-volume game, will depart for a fresh start elsewhere, cementing his turn, at least until time forgives and forgets, from program immortal to suitable scapegoat.

But is Carolina truly better?

The return of Armando Bacot and RJ Davis, announced over the span of 4 days last week, gives the Tar Heels a chance to be. The duo will make for a strong foundation, and that’s true regardless of whether North Carolina is done bleeding players to the transfer portal: The count is 6 as of March 30.

Bacot, the program’s all-time leading rebounder and a proud, respected leader, averaged 15.9 points and an ACC-leading 10.4 rebounds per game in 2022-23. The first-team All-ACC selection has 50 double-doubles over the past 2 seasons, the most in the country, and he may end up being healthier next year than this season, when he was bothered consistently by a shoulder injury he aggravated early in the campaign.

Bacot’s 5th year is brought to you in part by NIL, as Saturday Road sources at UNC say that Bacot’s entire package, at present, amounts to around $1 million, a $200,000 increase over where he was this season’s value. But Bacot’s return is also a goodbye tour turned into a redeem team mission with one objective: return North Carolina to a position of prominence.

“The story of this year was too much talking about last year,” Bacot said following North Carolina’s last game this season, a loss to Virginia in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals.

That’s true. It may also be a gift next season. Every time North Carolina plays next season, the failure of the prior year will come up, just as the successes of last season came up every time North Carolina took the floor this year. There will be no shortage of motivation for Bacot and the team he leads in 2023-24.

Having Davis back will help, from a leadership and offensive standpoint.

Davis was North Carolina’s best offensive player in 2022-23. He had the highest offensive rating, per KenPom, shot a team-high 36% from deep, was the team’s best free-throw shooter at 88%, and had the 2nd-lowest turnover rate on the team (Leaky Black). With the loss of Love, Davis won’t have to defer as much to a backcourt-mate for shots, and you can expect he’ll use his ability to penetrate and get to the basket more as a senior.

Hubert Davis also has a chance to give Davis drive and kick options for those drives, given North Carolina has lost 4 wings to the portal — only one of whom, Puff Johnson, was a threat from deep. A pair of floor-spacing wings who make it easier for Davis to get in the paint– and create duck-in opportunities for Bacot — would help this offense immensely next season.

RJ Davis’ return also assures Carolina of two pillars in the locker room, guys who invaluably know what it takes to succeed immensely and fail spectacularly. That balance should help keep a locker room full of new faces focused and together, a problem, for whatever reason, the Tar Heels couldn’t overcome this season. The result of that tension: Too often the team felt and played less like a collective and more like a collection of individuals.

With Love gone from a Carolina backcourt that produced its fewest single-season assists number since 1968-1969, the task ahead of Hubert Davis is how to blend and build a roster around two foundational stars. Promising guard Seth Trimble should help, especially if the game slows down for him as a sophomore. Jalen Washington’s continued growth should give the Tar Heels a different, but interesting type of 4-man who may reduce the pressure on Bacot offensively. And if, as expected, talented Towson wing Nick Timberlake joins the fray, Davis will immediately have a good looking corps.

Does that mean Bacot and Davis can finally chase an ACC championship, something that has eluded them since they arrived on campus? Does that mean the Tar Heels will waltz back to the Big Dance? Of course not. The work is still in front of the Tar Heels. But the house has a solid foundation, even as North Carolina says farewell to Caleb Love.