Here we are; we've flashed back to the 2015-2016 basketball season, with the movement of one leg. Thank you, Grayson Allen, for assisting in the procession of time and progress, along with the stupidity of mainstream media. Picture this- Duke Basketball and the legendary coach Krzyzewski make their way to Greensboro to play Elon University, which most people outside of the Carolinas probably hadn't heard of until that day. They are a fairly liberal school who just transitioned into D1 play less than twenty years ago, located in North Carolina. The Elon men's basketball team was 7-4 going into the matchup, and Duke was 11-1, ranked in the top ten. It was supposed to be pretty low-key. I mean, Duke had their one-two punch Luke Kennard and Grayson Allen, and Harry Giles had just returned from a knee injury; it should've been simple.
But as fate would have it, in the first half of what turned out to be a very close game, it happened again. Duke star guard, Grayson Allen, tripped an Elon player. He was charged with a technical, overreacted a little bit, and everyone in the arena moved on.
However that was not the case outside of the arena. ESPN and every other sports (and even some non-sport-affiliated) media blew that extension of Duke's star guard out of proportion big time. It's been two days and it's still making every headline. Mind you, this is the same week the video of Joe Mixon decking a woman hit the media. Obviously, however, this was and still is bigger news. Let me paint this picture for you- you're on defense and you get knocked over. It's a one possession game, against an unranked opponent, and you're falling towards the ground watching a layup about to happen right over your head. You've got to stop it, so as you fall you decide to try and stick your body out there to make it stop. So your leg is right there, and you trip him. Is it the best idea? No. Is it deserving of a technical foul? Probably. Does it really warrant being suspended indefinitely? Nope. Does it need to be every headline of every sports news site? Absolutely not.
Really, just consider how absurd it is. People push and shove and fight in the sports world all the time, and even actually hurt fellow athletes, but an upstanding, privileged Duke star tripping a guy? One of the most eventfully terrible things to happen in 2016, of course.
Personally, being a future basketball coach myself, I don't even know that the incident was worthy of a suspension. It definitely was not worthy of an indefinite suspension. The technical foul call gives Elon two shots and the ball, as well as the initial foul. That's the point of the penalty- to punish a player for breaking the rules. In a game that close, it could've been detrimental to Duke, which in my opinion was punishment enough. When you consider that this is his third offense, I'm even okay with Coach K suspending the guy for a game. But when you take the event and look at it objectively, ignore the logo on the jersey or the name of his coach, it really wasn't that insanely flagrant. He fouled to stop a shot, and I've seen worse things occur at a high school basketball game. He got a technical called, and we all should've moved on.
So instead of complaining about the idiotic things that media chooses to cover, do something about it and stop feeding into the hype. Realize when things are being blown out of proportion and move on.
#FreeGraysonAllen
