Guess which team is having a good year and likes each other. Go ahead, guess!!
Here at Blue vs Blue, we’re fans of erudition as well as entertainment, and as such I offer up this little nugget for you to add to your personal lexicons.
According to Urban Dictionary, the verb ’ to Clown’ is defined as:” to embarrass, humiliate or make fun of.” One may be “clowned on” (Roy Williams is so tired of getting clowned on that all he does is stare at his shoes, thinking about what they would look like covered in vomit), suffer as the result of “clowning” Nolan was clowning Larry Drew with his crossover all night) or be on the receiving end of “a clowning” (The Duke UNC game last night was a clowning for the ages). The word also lends lends itself reamarkbly well to puns and wordplay e.g. the final clowndown, a clown supreme, and clownius maximus.
“Clowning” is alternately defined as: ” Initiating a circus in a place where there should be none” and ” Performing a feat of inglorious proportions”, both of which sum up UNC’s night (and season) rather perfectly, I would say.
There really isn’t much I can tell you about this game that isn’t evident from the final score. UNC was utterly and abjectly feckless. I guess after getting thrown under the bus by Roy all year the players have gotten pretty accustomed to getting run over, so last night wasn’t as painful as it might have been, but jeebus, that was ugly. Each one of Duke’s Big Three dropped at least 20 points and the Duke defense was simply humbling, allowing only 9 points in the first 11 minutes of the game and 9 points in the first 9 minutes of the Second Half. Zoubek was again a beast on the boards with 13 as Duke dominated every statistical category on the way to their second largest margin of victory in the series. It was so lopsided that, had Duke failed to score a second half point, they still would have won the game.
They Crazies were in full apecrap mode throughout, showing no mercy and giving no quarter to the hapless Holes. The only moment of real drama occurred when Coach K , after watching Miles Plumlee turn the ball over on consecutive offensive posessions and completely fail to play defense on consecutive posessions, almost spontaneously combusted during a timeout while giving Miles an extra orifice to work with. It was as mad as I’ve ever seen K get at one player, and I was pretty certain that Miles would not see the court again for the duration of the game. Quite to the contrary, Coach had him back in only minutes later and became Miles’ biggest cheerleader on the sideline, actually calling him over at one point to pointedly congratulate him after a great defensive play.
Needless to say it was a very emotional night all the way around; from Coach’s tears during the Senior introductions, to the distraught and helpless looking Roy Williams on the sideline, from the unbridled joy of the Crazies’ watching a once-in-several-generations beat down, to the grateful seniors thanking the crowd and gleefully cutting down the nets after the first 17-0 season any Duke team has had in Cameron’s illustrious history (Kyle Singler actually designed the 17 - 0 logo. Nifty!)
I’ll conclude with a lovely bit of bathos. Here are several Haikus from a post-game Facebook thread started by my buddy Jason Arroll :
A pass out of bounds
they sip on wine and eat cheese
the Tarheels’ season
Offense can’t keep up
Champions last year not this one
humiliating
March madness to come
Blue Devils have earned a run
Tarheels, on the couch
They play so flat ‘cause
Roy threw them under the bus
the N I T waits
