Season in Review: Deon Thompson

I know, I did it out of order. I was supposed to go numerically and I blew it by jumping from Ty Lawson to Wayne Ellington. Maybe it's ironic because Deon Thompson can be overlooked. Deon Thompson is a special player, but you really never knew what you were going to get out of him. Would it be the Thompson who was so dominate at the beginning of the year, or was it the barely-show up Thompson? Now people get down on Thompson a bit, but I don’t like to. He can get down on himself quite a bit and lose confidence, but when he’s on, he’s on. If you think of the game at Duke, he carried us in the first half. If you think about the championship game against MSU, he contributed quite a bit.

Things I didn’t like:
1. Lack on confidence. Obviously that hurts Deon quite a bit, but it also hurts our team. I don’t think we want to run the offense through a player that doesn’t have any confidence, but maybe that’s how you get him over the hump, by running some plays for him. But then again, Coach Williams doesn’t really like to run set plays very often. I don’t know.

2. Free throw shooting. Deon is somewhere in the 50% range, which to me, makes him a liability. We have been spoiled with Hansbrough’s good shooting, but Deon makes up for it. I would like to see him improve into the 60% range.

Things I liked:
1. Knew his role. If you watched Thompson, he plays pretty hard and doesn’t demand the ball. He knew that he was the fifth option on the team. Sure, he forced some shots, but who didn’t on the team? He never tried to do more than the team needed him to do.

2. Expanded range. Thompson has worked on his range a bit and is not hitting the 10-12 foot jumper regularly. If he could get it consistently to 15 feet, that would free things up for Davis next year. His jump shot looks pretty good too.

3. Improvement on defense. With college basketball seemingly getting more perimeter-oriented (in my mind anyway), the power forward position will need to guard more Kyle Singler-like players. Like, Ed Davis, I thought Deon improved quite a bit on perimeter defense. He also proved he can bang with the big boys by guarding Blake Griffin quite a bit.

We have seen what Deon can be like, when he was the man at the beginning of the year. It would be nice if that could transcend into a full season. My feeling is that he will be better scorer and probably get 14 points and 8 boards per game, but we’ll see. It really depends on how good John Henson and Leslie McDonald are. We’ll see.