Tennessee Performance Presents Challenge For GG Jackson

GG Jackson's response to South Carolina's recent loss to the Tennessee Volunteers could decide how the rest of his regular season plays out.

When you think of the greatest players to play basketball, you'll find certain moments, stretches, or games, where even the greatest to grace the hardwood couldn't rise to the occasion. 

It took Michael Jordan four NBA seasons to get the Chicago Bulls past the first round of the playoffs. Kobe Bryant once shot four airballs in a win-or-go-home game against the Utah Jazz in the 1997 Western Conference Semifinals. Lebron James and the Miami Heat went up 2-1 over the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 NBA Finals, only to lose the next three games as The King was out-dueled by Dallas superstar Dirk Nowitzki.

While not meant to be a comparison between GG Jackson and these all-time greats, the point here is that most people have games they'd like to forget. Still, for the best to ever do it, instead of letting these stretches or games plague their emotional state for a prolonged period, they use it as fuel and motivation to refine their craft to prevent it from happening again. 

In the upcoming weeks and months, Jackson will face his first major roadblock in his post-high school basketball career. He came to terms with the reality of his performance from Saturday afternoon against the Tennessee Volunteers, which, suffice to say, wasn't his best one.

Jackson didn't score a single point in the contest, missed all seven of his shots from the floor, and was essentially benched in the middle of the game by South Carolina head coach Lamont Paris for what was deemed to be both poor body language. Jackson has likely not seen a game unfold like this in several years, a period where he's won state titles at the high school level, MVPs at significant camps, and was once rated the best prospect in the 2023 recruiting cycle before reclassifying to the 2022 class.

Jackson is still 18 years old, and as teammate Hayden Brown so eloquently put it post-game, he has a lot of voices in his ear regarding his basketball career, something few people his age have to deal with daily. 

The Volunteers won't be the last good team South Carolina plays, so the chance to bounce back from this performance can either be an excellent opportunity for Jackson or one that sticks in his crawl and hurts him for the rest of the season.

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