Once upon a time, the North Carolina Tar Heels basketball program produced players that were as highly regarded by NBA front offices as any college basketball program in college basketball. However, over the past two decades, including the 2025 NBA Draft on Wednesday and Thursday night, that has not been the case.
Entering the first round of the 2025 NBA Draft on Wednesday night, the Tar Heels had gone 19 consecutive years without having a single player get selected with a top five picks in an NBA Draft.
This trend continued this year, as the earlier Tar Heel selected in the 2025 NBA Draft was Drake Powell, who was taken by the Atlanta Hawks with the No. 22 overall pick.
Unfortunately, this isn’t where the Tar Heels’ shortcomings end when it comes to the program’s recent inability to produce high-level NBA talent. In fact, the last time former Tar Heel that was named to an All-Star Game was Vince Carter, who has been out of the NBA since 2020.
The facts don’t lie in this case. Despite that fact that North Carolina is universally regarded as a blue blood college basketball program, they simply haven’t been able to turn some of their top recruits each year into appealing NBA talent.
Only time will tell whether the North Carolina basketball program will soon turn things around on this front. But on paper, it has been quite a long time since the Tar Heels program has been as great as most commonly regard it as being.
About Reice Shipley
Reice Shipley is a staff writer for Comeback Media that graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Sports Media. He previously worked at Barrett Sports Media and is a fan of all things Syracuse sports.