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North Carolina Basketball: What We Hope Marcus Paige Did This Summer

By James Fitzgerald

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When Marcus Paige decided that he was going to come back to North Carolina for his senior season, it had to be a relief for all Tar Heels’ fans from coast to coast.

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The return of Marcus Paige means that UNC is going to be a prohibitive favorite going into the 2015-16 season, and rightfully so.

Roy Williams core group is going to be intact for this years’ Tar Heels clubs with Kennedy Meeks, Brice Johnson, and Theo Pinson being the main supporting cast around Marcus Paige.

Paige should come into the 2015-16 season as the leading candidate for “ACC Player of the Year” and should be hands down a preseason First-Team All-ACC and All-American candidate.

Problem is that even with all those accolades potentially awaiting to be bestowed upon Marcus Paige, his NBA stock value oddly leaves little to be desired.

Marcus Paige is on the smallish side standing at 6-foot-1, 175 pounds.

But once you get past his stature, you see a player that has improved his game each of his three seasons at UNC.

USA TODAY Sports’ 2014-15 preseason college basketball All-American team

His points per game jumped from 8.2 points per game in his freshman campaign to 17.5 in his sophomore campaign.

He then leveled off in his junior year some and went down to 14.1 points per contest.

Regardless of that, his shooting has improved over that time, gradually getting better with his deep ball each season.

Last season, Paige shot 39.5% from three-point land, bettering his sophomore three-point percentage of 38.9% and obliterating his freshman mark of 34.4%.

That is significant because Paige does take a healthy amount of shots from beyond the arc. Last season he averaged 6.3 three-point attempts per contest.

In addition, Paige distributes the ball pretty well and has cut down on his turnovers every year.

So how is it that when you go to nbadraft.net, you do not see Paige’s name anywhere in the 60 selections they project being called in the 2016 NBA Draft?

When you go to the draftexpress.com 2016 Mock Draft, they have Paige as the 47th best prospect in the draft. That seems kind of low.

This leads us into what we hope he did this summer. When he announced that he was going to be coming back for his senior season, part of the reason had to be the fact that he wanted to be part of helping this current bunch of Tar Heels make a Final Four run.

But don’t fool yourself. Another reason why he came back to Chapel Hill is the fact that his draft stock is low, especially for a player who actually has shown improvement each year.

The first thing we hope he did this summer is get offended that his game is being disrespected.

To think that he is barely considered a second round draft pick at this time, going into his senior season, and with the improvement he has shown in his game is simply not right.

Secondly, we hope that he worked on some type of shot that he can go to in the lane that he can knockdown with some kind of consistency.

He can hit from deep at a pretty decent clip. But when your overall field goal percentage is 41.0% for your career, and you are coming off of shooting 41.3% for your junior season, overall shooting efficiency is something that you would want to see improvement in.

Lastly, we hope that he has gotten stronger during the summer so that he can take a few bumps in order to get into the lane and finish.

When you are 6-foot-1, 175 pounds, there is a little bit of wiggle room to get stronger in the upper body in order to absorb some extra physicality.

North Carolina Tar Heels
North Carolina Tar Heels /

North Carolina Tar Heels

Marcus Paige is one of the most important players going into the 2015-16 ACC season. He obviously knows that he has something to prove to himself and to a bunch of critics out there that are currently undervaluing his game.

All it is going to take is for Paige to lead the Tar Heels into the deep tourney run that everyone is expecting from them this upcoming season, and then maybe he will get the appreciation he deserves.

As far as the ACC goes, Marcus Paige has all the respect in the world, but oddly he is not really getting the respect from the NBA scouts that you would have thought he deserved.

This is a big year for Marcus Paige, and hopefully he put in the work this summer to prove all the so called experts wrong.

Next: T.J.Leaf Decommits From the Arizona Wildcats

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