Lamont Paris talks impact of South Carolina MBB freshman Marcus Johnson

My staff used to describe Marcus like midway through the summer is that this guy's not playing like a freshman and it had more to do just with aggressive not backing down defensively that's one of the areas that young people struggle to really you know it's the speed of the game the physicality of the game there's a level of discipline that's involved in being a good defender and so People tend to struggle, young guys, on the defensive side of the ball. And trust me, he's still got some things. He's got a couple of our defensive rules he's still trying to get better at. But he's rooted and founded in competitive spirit defensively. And so that takes care of a lot of different things on the defensive side of things. But he's also a confident guy. He's a, he's, he's, you know. I've encouraged him to be aggressive. He has a natural gift to score. I think you're going to do one of two things are either going to foster that or you're going to stymie that and so we've chosen to foster it and at the same time you know trying to we don't shy away from Telling him, hey, here's a better situation than the situation you were in. He's very, very receptive to that coaching. Coaching. That's why he will continue to grow. Thank you very much. But we've encouraged him to be aggressive, just whether that's getting to the basket, finding a shot, or getting out of assists. So it's not like this is a guy who's out here who knows where one guy is and where the rim is. He's aware of where his teammates are. And how to find them and get them things generated and at the same time he just has a natural gift of being aggressive to score the basketball.