YouTube Gold: The Brilliant Passing Of Manu Ginobli

In our ACC preview of Virginia, we compared St. Thomas transfer Thomas Rohde to NBA legend Manu Ginobli.

Well, sort of, anyway.

Rohde started at St. Thomas and, like Ginobli, he was clearly underrated.

It’s highly unlikely that he’ll be anywhere near the player that Ginobli was, but there is a common element to their game and that’s passing.

Great passers can entirely change the game. You can see it here with Rohde as he just guts the Oral Roberts defense. People have always criticized Larry Bird’s foot speed, but no one ever criticized his handspeed or, for that matter, the speed of his mind. You just never knew what he might do.

That was true for Ginobli, as you’ll see here.

Ginobli makes some extraordinary passes in this video, and, like Bird and to a much lesser extent Rohde, he makes really fast decisions. As a result, the ball moves so quickly to weak spots in the defense that no one could possibly catch up to it.

Our comparison of Rohde to Ginobli wasn’t necessarily very apt, but if he can pass like we saw in that clip, then Virginia fans are going to be in for a major treat.