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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE OPERATION BASKETBALLOctober 16, 2013Brice JohnsonMarcus PaigeCHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA JEFF FISCHEL: Talking Tar Heels. Brice, I hear you've been eating a lot. BRICE JOHNSON: Yes, I've been trying to. JEFF FISCHEL: Give me a sense of the diet now. BRICE JOHNSON: Well, the plan that they have me on is supposed to be six meals a day. I get four meals and a couple snacks maybe a day. Not the full six meals. JEFF FISCHEL: What is the goal weight‑wise? BRICE JOHNSON: The goal right now is 210. I'm at 207. JEFF FISCHEL: You want to keep growing for next season? BRICE JOHNSON: Yes. JEFF FISCHEL: Tough to put on the pounds? BRICE JOHNSON: Yeah, it's been pretty tough. JEFF FISCHEL: Marcus, I heard you were singing in the digital network booth. MARCUS PAIGE: They told us to have fun. Miley Cyrus song jumped into my head. I thought it would be fun. JEFF FISCHEL: That's what you listen to before the game? MARCUS PAIGE: Definitely. It gets me going (smiling). JEFF FISCHEL: Questions. Q. Can you talk about how well this team is handling all the distractions that have gone on with this off‑season with P.J. and all that? BRICE JOHNSON: We just been preparing like it's a regular day, moving forward. We're putting that behind us, just moving forward. MARCUS PAIGE: I think we understand that people are going to ask about it. As a team, we're ready to move past it. We've moved past it. We're working hard in practice every day trying to be the best team we can be day in and day out. So when we get him back, we're going to hit stride and continue playing the way we were playing before the games he's sitting out. Q. Can you both talk about coming to the dome this season in Syracuse. MARCUS PAIGE: I'm really excited. That place has had some huge crowds. Great basketball program that plays in front of those huge crowds. I'm excited to go up there and play. Adding them to the league is going to make our league more deep and competitive than it already is. Great to have Syracuse in our league. I'm excited to go up to New York. BRICE JOHNSON: I'd have to say the same thing. Just knowing the great tradition of the Syracuse basketball program, I'm looking forward to playing them in the Carrier Dome. Q. We're used to seeing Duke and North Carolina compete for the No.1 spot in the ACC. With the influx of other teams, talk about the challenge this year. BRICE JOHNSON: It's going to be great. Just knowing there's a lot more competition, it's going to be a lot tougher for somebody to get that No.1 spot, knowing every night you have to go out there and compete, you can't take a night off. MARCUS PAIGE: You have to be completely better than anyone else, any other league in the top. You're going to have some parity in the top, have teams go on runs. Then another team that's just as good can go on a run and claim that top spot. Teams that are used to winning regular‑season titles are going to be disappointed, so I'm excited for it. Q. Last year it seems like you played your best basketball late in the season. You were a young team. How does that help you moving forward this year? MARCUS PAIGE: I think it helps a lot. We were a young team. We were inexperienced, too. The guys returning didn't play a whole lot. Our guy that we featured last year, James Michael, was playing behind John Henson the year before. He got thrown into a spot where we expected him to be a big‑time star for us. He handled that well. As a team we took some bumps throughout the way. That experience will help us this year. We're more of a veteran group. We know what to expect. Hopefully we can advance past what we did last year. BRICE JOHNSON: Like Marcus said, just the experience part will help us a lot. Going into the second round of the tournament, we know what's expected of us, what we need to do to get farther, what we need to do, to work on as a team. Me and Marcus working on getting bigger and stronger as a team, me and him personally. Just the experience of playing in the tournament helped us a lot. JEFF FISCHEL: Marcus, who is going to be the most improved player for UNC this year? MARCUS PAIGE: Oh, man. I'd like to say everything. I think Joel James is going to show great improvement. Last year whenever he was in the game, he would struggle with foul trouble. The system didn't quite click for him in terms of running our secondary break, things like that. He shaped up his body even more. He has a year under his belt. He knows what to expect. I think we're going to see a huge improvement out of him. That's going to help us establishing a big presence inside. I'm excited for what he's going to bring to the table this year. JEFF FISCHEL: Brice, how do you feel you need to improve individually this season? BRICE JOHNSON: My goal is to get back to playing a lot more defense like I was in high school than last year. Marcus could probably tell you this, I probably didn't play as much defense as I should. It's part of me learning the college system. Just getting down in the stance was tough for me because I was used to standing in the lane, blocking shots in high school. It was tougher to come in and face somebody that played like me, go by you. JEFF FISCHEL: Marcus, was it an adjustment for you as well? MARCUS PAIGE: Definitely. The strength and physicality was a big adjustment. In high school you can get away with taking plays off on defense, just relying on your ability to stay in front of guys, save your energy for scoring on offense. In college, you can't take any possessions off. Guys are bigger, stronger. They make you pay every time. That's definitely an adjustment. It's hard for a lot of freshmen, not just us. Now that we're not freshmen anymore, we can hopefully eliminate some of those mistakes and be more solid on the defensive end. Q. When the media poll comes out, I'm sure you'll be up at the top. Can you talk about playing from that frontrunner position? MARCUS PAIGE: A lot of the programs that are considered elite get thrown up in the top 10 regardless of who they have coming back or whatnot. I think we have a lot of pieces come back that can help us make a run that far or get deep into being one of the top five, top‑10 teams in the country. Until we start playing games, those rankings don't mean anything. It shows we have a lot of pieces, if we come together, hit or stride, can make a lot of noise come March or April. BRICE JOHNSON: Rankings‑wise, I don't really think they mean anything at the beginning of the season. When the games start, it depends on what your schedule is like, how you're playing progressively during the season. I mean, basically where they think you're going to be during the season, basically like where they think you're going to be, but at the end of the day you have to back it up in your playing instead of like relying on, We're top five, we're top 10, we can take nights off and we're still going to win. You have to compete and be able to back up that ranking that you have. JEFF FISCHEL: Brice, you and P.J. surprised Marcus, jumping out of the locker. Talk about why you did that. Had people laughing a little bit. BRICE JOHNSON: Me and P.J. were sitting there. We just wanted like a good, quick laugh, something a little funny. We was going to videotape it to have a little fun. It so happened it was Marcus. His locker was open. We decided P.J. would sit in his locker and wait for him to come in. When he jumped out, Marcus fell. At the beginning we didn't think it was going to blow up like it did. We thought it was going to be a couple laughs in the locker room. But it blew up like wildfire. MARCUS PAIGE: I don't know what you're talking about (laughter). Honestly, that's just P.J.'s personality. He's great to have around. I consider him a good friend. He always jokes around with me and picks on me a lot. The fact that it was him didn't surprise me, but the fact he was in my locker surprised me. They caught me off guard. That's okay, it's a long year. JEFF FISCHEL: Great talking to you guys. Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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