- Duke hosted Syracuse last night with the Blue Devils having lost two in a row, the most recent an exciting back-and-forth with Notre Dame. Last night’s contest was horrifying by comparison, with neither team shooting the ball particularly well. Three-point shooting was a major factor, with Syracuse shooting 11-23 from 3 and Duke shooting a paltry 10-37. Syracuse also grabbed 26 offensive rebounds, which may lead to Coach K to do more performance art to illustrate rebounding technique in his press conferences.
- The ending of the game was not without some sort of controversy. With Duke trailing by 1, Greyson Allen missed a layup, and Duke missed another rebound. And then this happened:
Coach K was livid at the n0-call on the collision between Malachi Richardson and Matt Jones. So angry in fact that he zoomed through the handshake line
https://vine.co/v/iOL17VLzjIe
To dress down the ACC Officiating representative that was in attendance.
Adjust your hot takes accordingly.
- Also, there was another controversy that developed in the post-game locker room, with Matt Jones displaying bite marks on his hand:
Matt Jones's hand. Said it happened on last play of the game (bite mark?) showed ref to no avail pic.twitter.com/j4DfB5NmJZ
— Laura Keeley (@laurakeeley) January 19, 2016
However, video replay shows that bite probably didn’t happen there.
We can only speculate that the bite mark was actually punishment dished out for Matt Jones’ terrible 2-11 shooting night.
- With this loss, Duke has lost 3 consecutive games to unranked opponents and stands a good chance of moving out of the AP Top 25 for the first time since 2007. If Duke coaches, players, and fans need help on how to cope with this, look east to NC State who falls out of the AP Top 25 almost as soon as they enter it.
- Monday’s news was dominated once again by another angry letter-to-the-editor in the wake of a big Carolina Panthers’ win leading us to ask the question … has any one team ever made more people mad than Cam Newton’s Panthers? This time, it was a Vine of Newton being tossed a “12th Man” flag by a fan, and balling it up and throwing it on the ground on the way off of the field after Sunday’s win against the Seattle Seahawks that led someone named “Sarah” to pen an angry letter on the Facebook wall of a local Seattle radio station.
- Sarah writes “Seahawks fans aren’t just fans” and then goes on to write a bunch of garbage that demonstrates that Seahawks fans ARE just fans who get really angry about losing and need to write letters to make themselves feel better about cheering for an inferior team.
- The Charlotte Hornets defeated the Utah Jazz last night in double overtime 124-119. The big story of the night was Kemba Walker scoring a career-high and franchise-high 52 points. He also logged 9 rebounds and 8 eight assists, flirting with a triple-double. The 8 assists are most impressive, given his refusal to let any other teammate shoot the ball.
- NC State travels to Pitt (-8.5) tonight to lose to Jamie Dixon and the Panthers. NC State will cover, however, losing only by 7 points after being down by 18 early in the second half.
