Michael Malone begins his North Carolina preseason slate, with early roster takeaways emerging from the first exhibition wave

Michael Malone’s first preseason outing at North Carolina checked a basic box, putting a new staff and a refreshed roster approach onto the floor in a meaningful context: a three-game preseason exhibition run. On Friday night at First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro, N.C., the Tar Heels began the Michael Malone era in front of a partisan Gate City crowd, with the moment framed by CBS Sports as both a public introduction and an early on-court assessment.

UNC’s opening reveal mattered as a baseline for how Malone intends to organize a team that must still develop cohesion before the first games that count. Preseason exhibitions are typically where roles are tested, rotations are explored, and continuity is measured, particularly for programs installing new offensive and defensive habits. The first night did not settle every question about the Tar Heels’ identity, but it established the coaching era’s starting point as Malone and his staff moved from planning to execution.

Around the broader preseason landscape, USC drew attention in the same evening window through Alijah Arenas, who CBS Sports highlighted as shining for the Trojans. In preseason settings, a player’s impact can show up quickly, not only in scoring but in how reliably they can create space, make decisions under low-pressure game rhythms, and assert themselves within a team’s early spacing and pace. CBS Sports’ early takeaways pointed to Arenas as a key example of that immediate adjustment.

Indiana’s tune-up also centered on a specific thematic goal, as CBS Sports reported the program “beefed up its rebounding” in a scrimmage versus Butler. Rebounding is one of those fundamentals that can be stressed and measured rapidly in preseason, and scrimmages often serve as the first place to see whether a team’s effort, box-out discipline, and positioning have improved. While preseason margins can fluctuate, the focus on rebounding indicates a priority area for the Hoosiers as they search for consistency before conference play.

New Mexico’s preseason story carried a sharper scoreboard headline. CBS Sports reported that Jake Hall scored 31 points in a scrimmage, an output that functions as a loud early marker for offensive readiness. For a program trying to build confidence and continuity in August-to-November basketball, a high individual scoring night can also reveal whether shot-making is supported by spacing, ball movement, and shot quality, or whether it comes from a narrow set of circumstances.

Taken together, the early wave of exhibitions and scrimmages suggests what many teams will be trying to accomplish over the next few weeks: define roles, tighten defensive and rebounding principles, and identify who can reliably carry scoring responsibility when the game rhythm changes. For North Carolina, the first Malone-era outing is best read as the beginning of that process rather than the conclusion.

What to watch next is how those early themes persist across subsequent preseason games. If UNC’s rotation clarity grows and its defensive structure holds under pressure, that will answer some of the biggest practical questions from the coaching transition. For the other programs mentioned by CBS Sports, the key is whether Arenas’ impact, Indiana’s rebounding improvements, and Hall’s scoring translate from scrimmage brightness into repeatable performance when postseason-style intensity increases.