Most exciting defensive plays I remember:

1. Jones intercepting the ball at Duke with a tie score and racing for the winning basket at the buzzer in 1974.

2. Dudley Bradley picking Clyde Austin after UNC had blown a twenty point halftime lead and then dunking it in the final seconds for the win in 1978.

3. Jordan picking Rick Carlise I believe it was and dunking UNC to the lead in a huge comeback over Ralph and Co. in 1983.

4. Jordan blocking Lefty’s son’s shot which appeared to be an easy lay-up to preserve a one point win in 1983.

5. Jordan cutting off the defensive lane in the final seconds against Georgetown, making Fred Brown abort a pass into the middle and instead pass to the player to his righthand side on the court, who happened to be James Worthy.

I think Ginyard understands defense like Frasor. Frasor would do things like beat his man to the spot or see a breakdown happening and rotate into position to help. Ginyard does the same thing. Overall Ginyard moves his feet well, has good length and a nose for the ball. Of course it is hard to quantify this stuff and not many people spend a game watching one player on defense which is why you should rely on UNC’s defensive grading.

I do know the media has a penchant for hyping a player’s defense when there is evidence to the contrary. I am not convinced that is the case here but with Shelden Williams all we heard was how great a defender he was but Sean May and Tyler Hansbrough ate his lunch more than once. Williams was a shot blocker and had a nickname so I guess that means he was awesome on defense.

The best comparison I can think of is a baseball one: Omar Vizquel in the nineties was anointed as the ne plus ultra defensive shortstop, when he was really just one of a number of good defensive shortstops. (Credit to Bill James for pointing this out.) But when the press get it in to their head to say one thing about a guy, they say it to death, as we well know.

But the Hailey article is still bull.

In my opinion, Danny Green was always a better player than Marcus Ginyard. I always had the feeling that Ginyard started ahead of Green just to send a message to the other players about how important defense is. But not exciting defense, but rather staid, non quantifiable defense without spectacular plays. Bobby Frasor was rated highly on defense in the same way. Green on the other hand was making spectacular blocks and interceptions but presumably doing other things the coaching staff disliked on the defensive end.

Ginyard is from our area up here and seems like a pretty good kid, although Roy did seem sort of perturbed with him about his injury last year around the time of the Wake and C of C games. I don’t find his game to be particularly nice to watch or graceful. Well, neither was Hansbrough’s, or Moses Malone, so that is just icing on the cake for your MJ’s and the like. Ginyard is okay on offense, but erratic, sometimes really hitting from outside and sometimes not.

In many ways, Ginyard does seem like a shorter David Noel. I always did think, however, that Danny Green felt as though he was being treated a bit harshly having to sit behind Ginyard for three years and perhaps that had something to do with Green’s testing the waters in 2008. Obviously, that is not Marcus’s fault but he, to me is a bit like Derrick Phelps.

I made a comment that maybe Phelps was as good as Lawson which got shot down by most people on here, and probably rightly. But some analysts say in certain situations, mediocre offensive players like Bill Russell or Derrick Phelps can actually be more efficient for a team than a Wilt Chamberlain or Ty Lawson. Is Ginyard’s defense at that kind of Michael Jordan level? I am not sure I see it.

Defense is hard to quantify for non-centers. You could tell that Bill Russell was a great defender but with guards, sometimes they get turnovers when they are actually out of position. If the staff thinks Ginyard is a great defender, then that is good enough for me, because they are actually keeping tabs on things, such as stops, rather than blocks and interceptions which were more Green’s wont.

I think we did see that in the biggest game of Ginyard’s life, against Kansas in 2008, he was not particularly effective on the defensive end, to put it mildly. He was horrible on the offensive end.

Take a look at the Kansas-UNC box score and, if I were Danny Green, I would be upset. I think Ginyard had a Shammond Williams kind of game, but on both ends of the court.

Ginyard played many more minutes than Green and yet scored zero points, while Green notched 15 on 6-13 shooting. Ginyard had one foul and a couple of rebounds, with no turnovers or blocked shots. All the while, we were getting lit up by Mario Chambers and Brandon Rush, who went 16-27 from the field.

Green was about the only guy keeping us in the game. Had Marcus played any kind of decent game, who knows whether UNC might have made it all the way back from 40-12.

I have to say that I cannot disagree that Ginyard’s absence last year was not an overall positive because I think it is impossible for Williams not to play Ginyard heavy minutes. He just has a connection with that kind of kid, just like he did with Frasor.

Green set all kinds of UNC records last year for most games and most games won, while finishing on the 3rd team All ACC and 1st team All ACC Defense teams, strangely enough among rumblings among our own that he really wasn’t that great a defensive player.

Anyway, now is the time for Ginyard to show something. Frasor, Green and Hansbrough are gone and this is Ginyard’s team. Regardless of what one thinks he has achieved so far this year, it is now put up or shut up. I am not going to go back and look at the stats but at this point, Ginyard has not had a particularly distinguished career given the high standards at UNC. I think he is behind somewhat forgotten guys like Jeff Lebo, Steve Hale, Kevin Madden. Dudley Bradley and John Kuester.

I sincerely hope to see the kind of performances from him that merit the large numbers of minutes that he was logging in 2008.