Morgan’s cage game gets a thumbs up
Despite losing feeling in his shooting hand, UBC veteran is playing his best basketball
Despite being a player whose scoring touch is best defined as deft, Conor Morgan hasn’t exactly resembled a surgeon in how he’s cared for the tools of his trade.
Yet despite the nerve damage that has numbed the feeling in two of the fingers on his right shooting hand, the UBC Thunderbirds’ fourth-year forward has made the paint his personal operating room this season at War Memorial Gymnasium.
Over the summer, while working as a bartender at various locales around the city, the 6-foot-9 Morgan sliced open his index finger and severed a nerve severely enough that a part of it has gone numb. That follows on the heels of a thumb injury he suffered while dunking a basketball during his high school days at Victoria’s Mount Douglas Secondary School.
Now, even with his two dinged-up digits, Morgan is playing the best basketball of his life.
“All I can say is that confidence comes from repetition and maybe those injuries pushed him into the gym even more,” says UBC head coach Kevin Hanson, who has watched Morgan explode out of the gates to the tune of 24.3 points per game, the third-best scoring average in the nation.
“Right now, he is at his alltime high in terms of confidence, and you can see it in his scoring prowess.”
Morgan leads undefeated, U Sports No. 2-ranked UBC (6-0) into its final two games before the Canada West’s winter hiatus when the ’Birds host the UBC Okanagan Heat on Friday (8 p.m.) and Saturday (7 p.m.).
Empowered by the team’s solid showing as last season’s hosts at the CIS Final 8 national championships, Morgan credits a non-stop summer of training with his teammates for helping him push through the self-doubt of whether the accident would numb the potency of his game.
“I have to give the credit to Phil,” Morgan says of ’Birds point guard Phil Jalalpoor. “It was weird, but he just kept telling me to trust in the process and he got it into my head that I was actually going to come back and be better than I was before.”
Jalalpoor was right because Morgan is playing like a national player of the year candidate, scoring at a 61 per cent clip from the field despite the fact that, in addition to his layups and dunks inside, he is still counted upon as a key jump shooter.
“The genesis of all great play stems from confidence,” says Hanson, referencing how Morgan went out and scored a career-high 37 points last Sunday in UBC’s 93-89 home-floor overtime win over Victoria.
“Once you’re positive, the power of the mind can be an incredible thing.”
Morgan, however, doesn’t expect to be getting the feeling back in his two fingers anytime soon.
“Ever since I cut my (thumb), it hasn’t come back,” says Morgan. “I’m a kinesiology major and I just know. It’s not coming back.”
Yet his fingers have never been more on the pulse of his game than they are now.