VJ King navigating the age of social media to find confidence

Louisville basketball’s VJ King is finding a way to be mentally tough at a time when it has never been more difficult.

There’s a lot that one forgets about spring every year when it rolls around. Winter steals the optimism inside of you for a few long months.

We get so used to how still winter is. No birds chirping at sunrise. Short days. Long nights. The trees are barren and grass is brown. Things are quiet, grey and ugly.

But each year, we are met with the promise of new life. March.

Flowers in bloom, sunshine on your face, longer days, and happier faces. In March, change is quite literally in the air.

Of course, as 17,000 patrons entered the KFC Yum! Center on Sunday, they were faced with mid-30’s temperatures and heavy snowfall. This is Louisville, Kentucky after all, and though the promise of March as we’ve come to know it is right around the corner, the Cardinals are more than ready to end a tough stretch of winter.

Louisville was blazing hot entering February at 7-1 in the ACC, and tied for first place atop the conference. Eight games later, the Cards were reeling, having gone 2-6 over the last month. Still, hope remains that Louisville can get things turned around.

It is March after all, and change was in the air Sunday for the Cards. Louisville looked poised throughout against Notre Dame but, maybe most importantly, UofL got serious contributions from their player trying to work through his biggest slump- VJ King.

On March 3rd, 2019, VJ King turned over a new leaf.

It has become one of the hottest topics around Louisville basketball. VJ King may be the most talented player on the team, yet when he has gotten into games in 2019, he has often looked lost and confused.

Louisville head coach Chris Mack eluded to King playing very well in practice, but his excellent play ultimately has never translated to actual games. Still, Mack reiterated after the game that King has “never once hung his head.”

King is the most highly decorated player on the Louisville roster. He was a 5-star, McDonald’s All-American, and a can’t-miss prospect for Rick Pitino. He was the only returning starter from a year ago, and was expected to take a huge step up under Mack- a coach that loves long, athletic small forwards. King was elected a captain in the offseason, and has always had the utmost respect from his coaches and peers.

However, when the season began, it quickly became clear that the adjustment to his third coach in three years was not an easy one for King. Dwayne Sutton, a forward from Louisville Manual, which sits directly across the street from UofL never had any interest from the Cards’s staff out of high school. It took a solid year for Sutton at UNC Asheville before he made his way back to Louisville. Yet Sutton, formerly the 333rd ranked player in the country, was the one out-performing King, thus relegating him to the bench.

King’s minutes quickly diminished, and so did his confidence. King has always had the backing of most die hard supporters, but many quickly took to social media and were critical of the junior’s play. Many social media posts called King “soft,” “overrated,” or called for him to transfer. King’s play worsened. It got to the point where he would get into a game and pick up one or two fouls in his first two defensive possessions. By the time the Cardinals played Virginia and Duke, King never even got into the game.

“Social media can rob you of confidence sometimes,” said Mack, referring to King’s inexplicable slump. “I don’t care if you say ‘put it away.’ Kids have grown up in it.”

Louisville survived much of conference play with Sutton and Sophomore Jordan Nwora playing the vast majority of the minutes at the forward positions. However, during Louisville’s slump, both of Louisville’s starting wings began to falter as well.

Enter King.

Although it was overshadowed by an incredibly ugly loss, King played 19 minutes, was extremely assertive, scored 5 points, snagged four boards, and dished out an assist in Louisville’s game against Boston College. King effectively locked down the Eagles’s all-conference guard Ky Bowman, and when he went out, Bowman took over the game.

Then, on Sunday, King was everything Louisville fans had been dying to see from him all season long. He was slashing down the lane, making aggressive cuts, setting solid screens, making crisp passes, dominating on the glass, and, yes, scoring points. He finished with 6 points, 10 rebounds, 2 assists, and 0 fouls in 24 minutes- his second-most minutes played all season.

His final basket of the game elicited hands down the most thunderous roar of the game from the crowd, who gave King a standing ovation on an impressive And-1, falling away from the rim.

“It’s hard to describe how good of a kid he is,” said Mack, who spent about 8 minutes of his 9 minute post-game presser fielding questions about King and answering in full detail. “I know a lot of people only see him as a basketball player, so some of the things that he’s been through to play as confident as he has the last couple of games… He’s really given our team a boost of energy.”

Again, Mack referenced how social media definitely had a negative effect on a lot of his players. Most of this Louisville team was not allowed to use social media during the season under Rick Pitino and interim David Padgett. King has drawn the ire of more angry tweeters than the rest of the Cardinals combined. A simple search of his name will render some rather unpleasant comments.

King is clearly a player who let the game become too much about his flaws and not enough about his strengths. What he has failed to see is that, when he plays loose, it frees up his game. When he entered the game for the majority of the last three months, you could see King could feel the eyes in the back of his head, waiting for him to mess up.

Mack said of King continuing to play more assertively, “I’m hoping that some of the confidence issues that he’s had just play all out, and I think he’s done that.”

If King plays all out, and realizes that the people who matter have his back win or lose, then he has the ability to take this Louisville team to the next level. He is a freak athlete with the ability to do things on both sides of the floor that no one else on his team can do.

Kings counterpart, Sutton, is sure to find his form again soon. Still, there is no reason that Sutton and King cannot coexist in this lineup. If anything, having both players performing up to their potential is a lethal combination.

March is here, and Louisville is beginning to turn over a new leaf. Although they aren’t quite in full bloom yet, the attitude for this Cardinals squad is beginning to take a turn for the better. And in a season of change, VJ King knows that it can only be a positive one if the Cards are going to be dancing into April.

“It’s a next day, next game mentality for us,” he told Paul Rogers after the game. “We can’t focus on what happened in the past, we only have what’s in front of us.”

What’s ahead of King could make everyone forget about slumps and rough stretches in the schedule. If he keeps hitting the floor every day with the same mentality, Louisville basketball can get right back on track heading into the most wonderful time of the year.