![]() Life is good.īut it’s not the NBA, and you can’t help but wonder where he might be if Jenkins had missed his game-winning shot. The mountains that surround them are stunning. His fiancée, Taylor Hartzog, is here with him. ![]() And why shouldn’t he be? He has a good contract. (Getty Images)Īnyway, because he’s polite and smart, Paige says he’s not just content but happy here in Salt Lake City. Marcus Paige brings the ball up the court during an NBA D-League game on November 15, 2016, in Oklahoma City. Even my sophomore year, I think I averaged 4.5 points in the first half and like 13.5 in the second.” (To be specific, he actually averaged 6.0 in the first half and 11.6 in the second and overtime, but you get the point.) … They used to call me Second-Half Paige. “And you can’t worry about anything else. “When the game is on the line, that’s when you just have to play,” he says. This is partially why his favorite part of a basketball game is the end. It gets on my fiancee’s nerves.”īut all of that thinking, the mental gymnastics of arguing and reasoning, can wear on you after a while. “Even when I agree with something, I’ll play devil’s advocate. “ were saying it would’ve replaced shot as the best in Tar Heel history.” - MARCUS PAIGE He first majored in public relations at Carolina, then realized he’d taken so many history electives that he could finish up another major too. He loves thinking so much that he accidentally double-majored in history. (Especially these days, right?) And Paige does love to think. “There’s a lot of things you can think about when you’re playing in an empty gym,” he says.Īnd that’s always been one of his…maybe not problems, because you can’t knock a guy for liking to think. It’s not exactly where Paige thought he would be at this point in his career. Paige is a guard for the NBA D-League’s Salt Lake City Stars, Arcidiacono for the Austin Spurs. It’s the Salt Lake City Community College gym, and the fans number not in the tens of thousands, nor even in the thousands, but in the hundreds. Now it’s about a year later, and Paige and Arcidiacono are still going at it, but in a very different arena. Paige had pulled the guys together and told them, “Yo, we can fold and act like we’ve lost this game, or we can try to make this interesting. When the ball dropped through the net, North Carolina’s comeback was complete and Marcus Paige pumped his fist, having just tied the national championship game against Villanova with 4.7 seconds left.Įven Michael Jordan, the Carolina legend who’s seen a clutch shot or two in his life and was watching from behind his old college team’s bench, got so excited he raised not one but both fists and extended them toward the heavens.įive minutes earlier, North Carolina had been down by 10. He’d pumped to avoid a block and maybe to pass, then decided to shoot anyway, and it was sublime.Īnd it wasn’t just the shot itself that was so beautiful, of course, but also the timing-the moment. A mind-bending, gooseflesh-inducing, double-clutch three-pointer from deep, his body twisting and hanging in the air, like he’d been CGI’d into a movie as some kind of left-handed master of hoop-fu.
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