Luke Winn at SI.com reveals how a budding friendship between Evan Turner and Deon Thompson turned into a bit of trash talking from Turner directed at Ginyard. Needless to say Ginyard got the last laugh.
And so he did: Over the summer, while playing on USA Basketball’s World University Games team that won a bronze medal in Serbia, Thompson became friends with Evan Turner, Ohio State’s 6-foot-7 junior point guard. They kept in touch over text messages, and in September, during the Ohio State-USC football game (Thompson is a SoCal kid who was watching the Trojans), began exchanging good-natured jabs about their impending meeting at Madison Square Garden, in the 2K Sports College Hoops Classic semifinals.
“[Turner] was telling Marcus” — Ginyard, the Heels’ designated defensive stopper, who redshirted their 2008-09 national title season to recover from a stress fracture in his left foot — “that he should strap up, and be ready to guard,” Thompson said. “So Marcus showed up, and I think he played great on Evan.”
The most telling indicator of how this game went comes from the very first line of the play-by-play summary of the game at ESPN.com:
Turner still managed 23 points but most of that came in the 2nd half with the game seemingly in hand. Turner also played better when he moved from PG to another position on the court. It is a common occurrence in college basketball that if you can disrupt the point guard or force them into poor play early, the rest of the offense will unravel in short order. That is what happened here and Ginyard gets tons of credit for it. The rest of the Heels were not too shabby either. Heading into this game one concern was UNC’s ability to matchup with 6-5 to 6-7 players who could shoot the ball from anywhere and create their own shot. The answer was simply: Size wins. More than that, UNC was well prepared and Roy deserves some credit for getting the Tar Heel players’ heads in the right place after the Valpo game.
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UNC is going to do that to a lot of teams/players this year. There is just no room for the other team to do much of anything when they play D like they did last night.
I think that players like Turner who rely on getting to the basket to get things going are going to have a lot of frustrating nights against us. Because of the size and shot blocking behind them it’s becoming obvious that like Ginyard can play really close aggressive defense. Get by them and the erasers are waiting for you. I think that this was shown on the one play where Turner pushed Ginyard to the ground (not called) and when he got to the basket four Heels obliterated his shot. and he touched the ball standing out of bounds. If you don’t have a shot, you have not shot.
On another topic, I know not all of you care about such things, but if Marcus Ginyard keeps playing that kind of defense and outside shooting, he’s going to sneak his way into the NBA. He harassed and hounded a player who is likely to be a top five pick in the draft who specializes in getting shots for himself and others. There are plenty of places for lockdown defenders who can shoot open three point shots.