Fact: #8 North Carolina defeats #1 Duke in the latest edition of the so-called greatest rivalry in all of sports
Fiction: #8 North Carolina defeats #1 Duke in the latest edition of the so-called greatest rivalry in all of sports solely because super-prospect Zion Williamson went down with a knee injury 30 seconds into the game when his foot exploded out of his shoe when trying to pivot
There’s a lot to talk about when it came to last night’s UNC-Duke matchup; it was the hottest ticket in all of sports, with tickets costing only second to the Superb Owl, the fact that among the litany of celebrities present for it was previous president Barack Obama, that it was the first time of the year where Duke’s super squad would be meeting arch-rival North Carolina for the first time, among other things.
But when the hoopla all died down and the final horn blew, it was #8 North Carolina cruising to an easy victory against the #1 ranked Duke squad on the road, where the Tar Heels scored the first basket of the game and never looked back the whole rest of the way.
The thing is, as the game chugged along with Duke being completely incapable of closing the margin to under seven points, the ESPN analysts began preemptively apologizing for the anticlimactic and completely uncompetitive contest, and were making all the excuses in the world that Duke was “devastated’ and “shell shocked” over the loss of their superstar (and likely one-and-done-er) Zion Williamson, after his shoe blew up on him 30 seconds into the game, leading to, a knee sprain.
Not a torn ACL, MCL or a dislocation. A knee sprain; yes, it sucks all the same, and Duke and Zion made the right call of pulling him, because forcing it can only make it worse, but it will get better on its own in time with rest and elevation. No surgery, no months-long recovery timetable. Just a game or two inactive, and he’ll likely be fine and ready to go and get back to denting basketballs and Mutombo-ing shots into the stands again.
But don’t let all those trite details stop celebrities and active NBA players act like Zion had his throat slit on the middle of Coach K Court, and the crime of the century had just occurred. Naturally, this re-ignites the whole notion that these kids should be allowed to go to the NBA straight from high school, but that’s a different rant for a different day.
The point is, if it were up to ESPN and the internet, North Carolina won solely because Zion Williamson went down, and Duke didn’t also have two of the other top-5 freshman prospects in the entire nation on their squad–except they did. I wonder what RJ Barrett and Cam Reddish felt after the game, with the media treating them like they were chopped liver in comparison to Zion; especially after the two of them combined for 60 points out of the 72 total scored by the entire team. Barrett’s 33 points led all scorers, and at the college ranks, a 30 point game is a pretty big deal, but nobody will ever remember it, since this will always be remembered as the “Zion’s shoe exploded” game.
Which is all in itself a really sad state of basketball, which sucks doubly, because I’ve always felt that the college ranks weren’t nearly as insufferable and bullshit as the NBA is these days. The fact that Duke’s literally put all of its eggs into the basket of Zion, despite the fact that they’ve got two other guys that would easily be the sole star of just about any other D-I school in the nation, if they all didn’t collude to come together to try and win a National Championship together before they all jumped into the NBA draft next year.
Sure, it’s true that had Zion not gotten hurt, Luke Maye probably doesn’t explode on Duke like he did last night, because he’d have been covered by him and not Jack White who played like the worst white shooter in the history of the game, but basketball is a team game; when one guy goes down, there’s still four other starters and an entire bench of players who are expected to pick up the slack, and not roll over and die because we can’t win without Zion.
When the day is over, I watched the game, because I got drawn into the hype of a dual top-10 ranked UNC-Duke matchup, and if you’re not intrinsically curious about Zion Williamson, you’re not really a sports fan. I earmarked the time and made sure that I was available for it, complaining about why an ACC game would be starting at 9 fucking pm. But by the time the threat of a late-game Duke three-pointer barrage had seemed unrealistic and it was apparent that North Carolina was going to win it, I was already pretty disgusted with the state of basketball, and certainly hope Zion gets better quickly, just so that when Duke fails to win the National Championship (again) this year, they won’t have any more excuses in March.
