Grayson Allen Refused A Hug From Dillon Brooks After Loss To Oregon

Grayson Allen has given the sports world plenty of reasons to dislike him during his two-year college basketball career. On Thursday night, he likely gave more ammunition to his legions of haters when he refused a hug from Oregon guard Dillon Brooks after Oregon dominated Duke 82-68 in the Sweet 16.

Allen has always seemed a bit prickly on the court and I have personally called him a dirty player on a number of occasions (because he is), but I’m not sure I can jump on the hate bandwagon for this one. Really, I’m torn.

Prior to the above video, the Ducks were winding down the clock, but encountered a situation where there was more time left on the game clock than the shot clock on their final possession. Those situations are always awkward. You either have to shoot the ball or take the shot clock violation. I’m in the camp that says you should always let the clock expire and hand the ball to the nearest official. Brooks apparently doesn’t subscribe to that line of thinking.

With 10 seconds remaining, Brooks opted not to let the shot clock expire and instead launched a long 3-pointer and actually hit it. When Duke came into the frontcourt and the buzzer finally sounded, he went to embrace Allen, but the Duke sophomore was having none of it.

Now look, I get that Allen was probably upset about a lot of things. In addition to Brook’s shot, Allen’s team got smacked around by a Pac-12 school, he was just 4-of-13 from the field and he didn’t get a chance to trip anyone all game. That said, this will not help his reputation as kind of a jerk.

I can’t drive the outrage bus on this one because I get why he was upset. Still, Allen needs to learn to be the bigger man and shrug something like that shot off.