Jermaine Marshall is a former Penn State and Arizona State guard that is now playing professionally in Greece. He has carved out a career for himself overseas and may have many more years ahead of him of playing professional basketball, but no matter what he accomplishes from here on out, he will never be able to live down what he did during a playoff game on Saturday.
Marshall’s team, Kifisia, was leading Aris 95-93 with just seconds left on the clock in a Greek League playoff game, when an Aris player missed a free throw. A Kifisia player came up with the rebound and, in an attempt to run out the clock, passed it to an open Marshall who needed only to take a dribble or toss the ball up in the air to ensure a victory.
What Marshall did instead was undoubtedly the worst possible thing he could have done in that scenario: he made a layup in his own basket.
Now, making a shot in your own team’s basket is bad, but it happens. It hilariously happened to Larry Nance Jr. and Omer Asik in the NBA just this year. But almost every time such a gaffe occurs, it’s an unintentional tip-in, not a full-fledged mental breakdown that has a player purposely shooting on their own rim. On top of that, the circumstances of the game, in which Marshall’s team was in the lead in the final moments and the postseason stakes, make this one of the worst blunders in the history of the game of basketball.
To put the icing on the embarrassing cake for the former Sun Devil, Aris lost the game in overtime, 108-103.
