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CHAPEL HILL – Elliot Cadeau reclassifying and showing up at North Carolina a year early wasn’t as simple a process as many believed, if one is to take public narratives with anything more than a grain of salt.
It was indeed a process, and it was something that came well into the AAU season, as THI reported multiple times. What were the keys in the supremely gifted point guard moving to the 2023 class from 2024 and arriving at UNC this summer?
Carolina Coach Hubert Davis went into that during his summer press conference Thursday at the Smith Center.
At 6-foot-2 and 170 pounds, Cadeau, who has dual citizenship in Sweden, is from Oradell, NJ, but he played last season at Link Academy in Branson, MO, and had a terrific AAU season. He played so well, thoughts of reclassifying and becoming a Tar Heel sooner rather than later took center stage in his thinking.
“Our conversations and recruitment with him was always being a part of the ’24 class,” Davis said. “I know that his experience playing for the Swedish National Team; he played extremely well, he ended up winning the championship. He won a championship with Link Academy, and it changed his thinking wanting to come here early.
“He also had a desire to want to be here. He’s such a team guy; he wants to win, he wants to be a great teammate, and that was a process in terms of him speeding up the process.”
Cadeau is about as traditional a point guard there is in the current era of basketball. But UNC also had senior RJ Davis returning to a role he had manned the last two seasons. Making this work also meant the veteran Tar Heel sliding over to the shooting guard spot, at least in theory.
That, of course, is assuming Cadeau starts at the point, which is the expectation. Davis will find himself on the ball, and certainly in end-of-clock situations more than enough, so whatever the discourse was like leading to Cadeau’s announcement in late May, Davis signing off was a key.
“Because of college basketball and where it is, there’s times that you have to tweak and pivot and alter and change,” Hubert Davis said. “Yes, but there were some long straight forward and direct conversations in regards to that.”
Cadeau is excited to play alongside Davis, he told THI in late May. He sees them meshing well and playing off one another’s strengths.
"I think I can fit very well with him,” Cadeau said. “He's a really good scorer, so I think me and him would definitely complement each other… I think I could play off the ball a little bit too. My AAU team has three point guards. When I played with Bergen Catholic my freshman year, we had three point guards."
Cadeau will turn 19 on September 4, and could have easily been in the class of 2023 anyway.
He represented the Swedish U18 team leading it to a gold medal in the 2022 FIBA U18 European Championship Division B category. He averaged 21.3 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 4.0 assists per contest.
Now, he’s running the point for a fabled program on as big a stage as there is in college basketball. Cadeau is confident he’s ready.
“I think I am the best point guard in the country,” he said. “I think I've been the best point guard in the country. If people see it or not it doesn't matter to me. I'm going to continue to keep on working, because I'm nowhere near where I want to be."
Carolina’s coach says Cadeau has blended in really well with a team that likely will having four other starters who are 25, 23, 22, and 21 years of age when the Tar Heels face Radford in November to open the season.
Armando Bacot is UNC’s all-time leading rebounder. Davis had 30-point, 12-assist, and 12-rebounds games in the NCAA Tournament in 2022. Cormac Ryan was a captain at Notre Dame. Harrison Ingram was a top-10 recruit who chose Stanford over UNC. And so on.
But Cadeau is mature, and meshing has not been an issue at all.
“Specifically, in regards to Elliot, I thought it was the right fit,” Davis said.
