WRAL Sports Fan

North Carolina

UNC's Thompson focuses on mental side of game

By Sam Rosenthal

Feb 16, 2009

Deon Thompson is not ‘psycho’ – as fans sometimes call fellow Tar Heel Tyler Hansbrough – but put it this way: For Thompson, more than 90 percent of the game is 50 percent mental.

And he’s the first to admit it.

“My mental game is what I’m working on the most,” Thompson said recently.
During Thompson’s first year at Carolina, some criticized his work ethic. So the summer before his sophomore year, he toiled relentlessly to improve his conditioning and his game. But he didn’t have the season he expected to have.

“I felt like I was doing everything else physically and putting up shots and working on my game,” Thompson said. “It’s like, what else can I do? And (Tar Heel trainer) Jonas (Sahratian) was telling me every day, ‘There’s a mental side to basketball.’ And Coach (Roy Williams) is telling me (that), and that’s the biggest thing everybody talks about is my mind, and how I bounce back from things, and how I take things.”

How he bounces back. How he takes things. You know, when the going gets tough.
Because when the going’s good, Thompson makes his presence felt everywhere on the court. When he’s on, his shots barely touch the net, let alone the rim, he grabs numerous rebounds, and he steals the ball and blocks shots with regularity.

But when things don’t go Thompson’s way, he diminishes – from the game and the stat sheet. It’s not that he necessarily plays poorly, but you forget he’s on the floor. When his shot rims out, or he starts slowly, or he plays a bad game, he lets it eat at him like an acid, and the recent past affects the immediate future.

Thompson said “it definitely is” easier when he starts a night hitting his jumper. “You don’t have to sit there and run back down court like, ‘Man, I just missed that shot,’ or something,” he said. “I’ve just got to figure out, if I do start missing shots, how to play when that happens, too.”

He said he rarely thinks about it in the weight room or during practice. But when he gets home, his internal dialogue rages. “I really struggle and think about things like, ‘Man, I’ve really got to pick it back up,’” Thompson said. “I try not to be so tough on myself about it and leave it in God’s hands, basically, and just let him take care of everything and keep working hard. There’s nothing you can replace with working hard.”

Thompson’s emphasis on hard work – not only on his physical game, but also on his mentality – has had, for the most part, positive results this season. His career high was 17 points coming into this year, in which he’s equaled or exceeded that total five times already. His scoring and rebounding averages have increased each year of his UNC career, he’s making over 50 percent of his field goals, and he’s shooting free throws better than he ever has before.

“I think the biggest thing is the mental part of it. Because he’s done a great job working out the last two summers, he really has,” Williams said. “But now, he’s taken that work that he’s done on his body and transferred that into basketball skills. His practice habits on the basketball court are much better, his work habits when he’s by himself are much better. I think he’s probably a little disappointed that he didn’t have a better year last year considering how hard he worked in the offseason … (But this year) it’s his whole attitude of what he’s trying to do to be the best player he can be.”

Williams calls it attitude, but Thompson uses a different word – something he yelled out during the team’s pregame ritual while the players made their way through the Smith Center tunnel to face Clemson.

“I got my swag on,” Thompson sang out. Then he scored 15 points on six-of-nine shooting, corralled five rebounds, and blocked a pair of shots as part of UNC’s 94-70 victory.

After the game, Thompson explained his personal statement. “We’re just trying to have fun, and play with a swag. ‘Cause we are a good team, and maybe we forget that at times, how talented and how deep we really are, so we’ve got to start playing like that and actually know that and back it up.”

The same applies to Thompson – sometimes, he forgets his talent level. So his coach and teammates try to remind him. Last season, when the Tar Heels beat the Boston College Eagles, Thompson established that 17-point career high mark and had four assists, three steals, six rebounds and a block.

“Deon was everywhere tonight,” Marcus Ginyard said after that game, “and that’s where we need Deon. And hopefully he can understand that he has such a great impact on this team when he plays like that, and so we just have to hope that this game gives him a lot of confidence.”

But the problem remains: Some games give him confidence, and others lessen it. When things went well for Thompson earlier this year, he said that the true test involved how he reacted to adversity. That test came against Michigan State, when Thompson thought he had a bad game but bounced back with a new career high of 22 points against Oral Roberts – hitting 10 of 12 shots.

“I didn’t get too down on myself,” Thompson said. “And after playing the game (tonight), I’m not too high. I’m just trying to be level with things.”

And what if this was last year? “I don’t even know,” he said, laughing. “If I would’ve played badly, I probably would’ve been in a slump for a really long time.”

But one look at Thompson’s game log from this year shows some alarming numbers: Thompson scored in double-digits in each of the Tar Heels’ first 12 games. In the 13 games since, he’s eclipsed 10 points on only four occasions. He also registered more steals and blocks during that first group of games.

You might call it a slump. Could be an effect of conference play early in the season versus ACC play more recently. Or it could be that Thompson became less a part of the offense of late because he was compensating offensively for the absence of Hansbrough while the latter rested his injured body early in the year.

Or it could be all in his head.