North Carolina’s 2026-27 men’s basketball roster is taking shape with a mix of familiar faces, a wave of transfers and a handful of newcomers from outside the college game.
The Tar Heels list five players back from last season’s team: seniors Jarin Stevenson, Jaydon Young and Evan Smith, junior John Holbrook and sophomore Isaiah Denis. That group comes off a 24-9 season in which UNC finished tied for fourth in the ACC and earned a No. 6 seed in the NCAA South Region.
First-year head coach Michael Malone added six college transfers, starting with graduate students Angelo Brizzi from Buffalo and Cameron Fens from South Dakota, senior Terrence Brown from Utah, and sophomores Matt Able from NC State, Neo Avdalas from Virginia Tech and Cade Bennerman, who red-shirted last year at Northwestern.
Carolina also brings in Alexandros Samodurov, a junior who arrives after playing for Panathinaikos in Athens, Greece.
The freshman class features Maximo Adams of Los Angeles, Sayon Keita of Mali, Malloy Smith of Encino, Calif., and Kevin Thomas of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Keita played U18 for FC Barcelona in Spain.
The international footprint keeps growing for UNC. Avdalas and Samodurov are the program’s first Tar Heels from Greece, while Keita becomes the second player from Africa and the first since Makhtar Ndiaye, a native of Senegal who played at UNC from 1996-98. In all, they push the school’s all-time total of international Tar Heels to 18.
Carolina opens the preseason on October 9 against Southern California at First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro.
A few jersey-number notes stand out, too. Denis has moved from No. 5, which he wore as a freshman, to No.
- Holbrook will wear No. 99, making him the first Tar Heel to ever wear a number higher than 55; the only previous UNC players to wear No. 55 were Matt Wenstrom, Wade Moody, Christian Keeling and Harrison Ingram.
Malloy Smith’s No. 30 carries family history. He is the third member of his family to wear it, following his father, Kenny, an All-America and record-setting point guard for Dean Smith in the mid-1980s, and his brother, K.J., who played for Roy Williams from 2017-21.
Avdalas will wear No. 17, the first Tar Heel to do so since Bill White, who wore it at home in 1949-50. Fens will wear No. 54, becoming the fifth player in UNC history to take that number and the first since Vasco Evtimov wore it as a freshman in 1996-97.
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