That is a very reasonable and realistic response. I kind of wonder how the media narrative would have been had he traveled the road of a Royce White. Unfortunately, the media narrative gets in the way of the truth far too often.
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negative wheat....no....never in a million years...
the arrogance displayed by this guy BEGS for laser-burning scrutiny and criticism...his entire persona is so self-gratifying, it sickens me.
i've said this before, and y'all can all pile on me again and take my sporks, but i STILL think it was a setup from the start, and if it wasn't from the start, it definitely was from the time roy waited outside his house while K was inside. I really WANTED him at duke, but now that i see through the facade, i'm so glad we dodged that bullet...
the ONLY good thing attached to that guy's LIFE so far is the fact that our coach actually tried to recruit him. My avatar says it all about who that guy REALLY is...
The pigeon deserves EVERY criticism he gets. And wait till next year, where he's there or not.
There's another one coming.
I'm confused about the message those links are intended to convey. The first is just Tokoto saying that Carolina felt like home and the second describes Tokoto as not considering himself better than anyone else on the team. It's not like he's the #1 player in the class and McDonald's AA. I don't think he's the second-coming of HB... whatever that may mean.
I think these are reasonable ideas. However, you're not always dealing with reasonable people, especially when it comes to a college basketball rivalry. And like it or not, Barnes opened himself up to this sort of ridicule with all the brand stuff. Barnes didn't want us to let him find his way; rather, he wanted to create his own lane. Whether he completely deserved that ridicule or not is another more complicated story, but it's not stunning it worked out like this when he couldn't live up to outgrown expectations that he himself had a large hand in creating. Not to mention, you'd be hard-pressed to get the average Duke fan not to resent Barnes if nothing else because of the execution of his announcement. In large part due to that, I've never particularly liked Barnes, and I've never felt too bad about that either. You can't like everybody. And I'm actually not convinced I'd have liked him even if he'd skyped Krzyzewski. I haven't liked every player on Duke's teams, including ones I've known personally, that's for sure. And I remember thinking his announcement was weird even before he named what school he was going to.
For what it's worth, here's my take on the situation for Dime.
I don't like this article because it implies that he is done at UNC. As far as we know, he isn't. If he comes back he will play at a high level and be a match-up nightmare for Duke. If he comes back UNC has a chance at a Final 4 and a National Title. I'm not willing to bury the kid yet because I don't want all the proclamations of "bust" to come back and bite us.
And what evidence of that do we have? two straight years he has come up woefully short of expectations. He's can be good, but only when he wants to...and his game does not seem to have improved significantly from the latter half of last season through this season. I'm not sure why we would expect it to jump next year...especially with the rest of his team likely fleeing to the NBA...
it's not like he's gonna turn into Zoubek or something...
On the Skype thing...
I guess I didn't see it all as that big a deal.
Yes it was a little over the top. But I see #1 Shabazz has set his press conference soon. It will be a big deal too. Duke's in the running, and could come out of it feeling high or low. Shabazz is creating the same sort of drama. It's what #1 HS recruits do.
Skype was relatively new at the time HB used it to announce. Maybe He just thought it'd be cool, not realizing that one fan base would take it as such a slap in the face?
I can say from my perspective that if the Skype had gone to Duke, I would have been bummed, but no more disappointed than i was when UNC lost Jason Williams to Duke.
I frequently try to figure out all the causes for the particular venom my fellow Duke fans have for HB (on this Carolina team I have much more loathing for Henson because of his on-court antics).
I think the Skype issue isn't so much the fact that he used Skype as it was the incredibly crafted nature of the announcement. His wording - emphasizing the academic excellence of the institution, was obviously carefully selected to make it impossible to tell if he was talking about Duke or UNC (and, to Duke ears, probably sounded very much like he was talking about Duke) until the drum roll ended. In addition, his talk about leaving his "legacy", before he had done anything at all at the college level, was absolutely arrogant.
Of course, if Coach K's face had popped up on screen, all of that would have been forgiven, although I honestly would be cringing as a Duke fan if a Duke recruit had made such a self-hyping, arrogant statement. Undoubtedly some have, but I am blissfully unaware.
I think there's also the feeling that he led Duke on. We're pretty proud of, and protective of, our coach, who we perceive to be a man with absolute honesty and integrity. The idea that some self-absorbed high schooler (and I don't mean that to be as harsh as it sounds - plenty of high schoolers, including me when I was in high school - are self absorbed) fed our coach a line of bs and pretended he was coming to Duke when he wasn't, definitely sticks in our collective craw. I didn't follow the HB recruitment that closely, but those who did seem pretty convinced he played us in a way that isn't at all typical for a recruit, even a top one.
Finally, inescapably, there's the fact that he chose our rival over us. Now, that happens quite often. More knowledgeable minds can cite several examples of Duke and UNC targeting the same recruit, and the recruit choosing one over the other. It's not the sole cause of the anti-Barnes venom, but it's a factor.
Personally, I kind of wish we'd calm down about it a little. On Skype-day he acted like an arrogant, immature kid who thought he was the center of the world. Since then he's done several things that reinforce the notion that he's got an exaggerated sense of self. Fine, I'm glad he's not a Duke player if he's going to act like that, but it's pretty forgivable given his age and the context that he's probably spent the last 6 years of his life being told by friends, family, college coaches, and the media that he's the Next Great Thing. I will admit, however, that I do like picking on Barnes as much as the next guy for his rampant self-promotion (I believe I may have actually been the first guy on DBR to use the nickname "The Black Pigeon", and, if so, I am deeply proud of the way it's stuck).
I'm also glad, as a ABC fan, that he hasn't turned into the next Jordan - I wasn't an ABCer when Jordan played for Carolina, but I can only imagine the pain I would have right now watching someone that good, and that clutch, playing in the pastel blue, especially without Dean to keep him under 20 points per game.
It's not the Skype as much as that even when most high schoolers have press conferences, they don't make the coaches wait until the press conference to find out. What usually happens is that they call the coaches who have recruited them ahead of the press conference and tell them in person that they have decided to go in another direction and thank them for being recruited, as common curtsey. Not only did HB not do this, as far as I know he never called the Duke staff even after he announced the decision, and that lack of respect is really what rub people the wrong way. Losing a recruit to UNC is always tough. But what makes Duke fans resent HB is the way he did it. I mean Duke lost plenty of high profile recruits to UNC over the years, there is a reason why we aren't bashing on Brendan Wright the way we bash HB.
I don't hate the kid and I'm certainly not indignant since it's a free country, but there's no question about the entire process being incredibly crafted. I wrote at the time that the whole thing seemed like a product launch, and here we are three years later and he is (and we are) talking about the brand. Maybe it's me, but there's more Kardashian than Jordan to this product.
As far as leading Duke on, I would say that's nothing compared to UCLA and Iowa IIRC. Those two schools had no chance as far as I can tell, but they were still in the mix so that he could garner more interest on the west coast and closer to home.
Finally, is there really a photo of him wearing a UNC shirt with Coach Roy the day of the (double) home visit or is that an urban legend? People were saying that he had his mind made up ahead of time, which is probably true, but I guess there is nothing like a little suspense to keep people tuned in to your reality show.
THANK YOU!!!
it wasn't the skype, in fact, when said he was going to skype, i thought that was pretty cool. I wasn't feeling to good about his little speech, but i thought it was a cool "youthfull" thing to do...
then i found out how he'd treated K and the staff....
end of story...str8 on the HATE list...not the dislike list, not the regular old rival list....the HATE list...
he's still on there...
As has been said, and reported by people much closer to the situation, it seemed that Harrison did not handle his interactions with the Duke staff in a mature way.
When you add in his attitude (most noticeably demonstrated by the famous handshake and congrats from last years Duke/Carolina game at Duke), his interest in his "brand" before he has actually accomplished enough by most peoples judgment to have EARNED a brand (he is the only player I've ever seen who has actively and noticeably pushed his own nickname in the form of shirts and necklaces and the like), and of course the massively over the top hype that he seemed to embrace, you can see why some people might not be huge fans of Harrison Barnes.
Skype's been around since 2003. In 2009 it was six years old which in internet terms is ancient. It was over the top. Most KU fans will agree too. Compare his announcement to Kyrie. Kyrie did not have a press conference or a gym full of people or the school placards laid out. It was just him and five minutes on ESPNU.
This isn't the reason I dislike him. Young kids do silly things. It's part of life. It's his continuing behavior that I find grating. Watch this clip from the UNC/UK game back in December: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YHzbtIrv1U . The guy is throwing a tantrum DURING the game. You can see that he thought he would be the hero, built his legency, and be like Mike. When the ball doesn't come his way, he pouts and stomps . Forget that the game is still going and he needs to foul to stop the clock.
You make it seem like Duke fans are the only people who don't like or pick apart Harrison Barnes. This past week, I've seen it coming from everywhere, including Carolina fans/writers. That's no surprise; I've seen plenty of Duke fans satisfied to eat their own with Rivers for perceived entitlement, even if it's not explicitly demonstrated. We have short memories, no patience and Twitter accounts to bare our immediate thoughts. Such is life, you know? People only started to realize LeBron James probably isn't the worst dude in America when he backed Trayvon very publicly. What'd he do? A pretentious announcement special.
For all I know, all of this is just youthful hubris, which I wrote in the Dime post. I can give him the benefit of the doubt without wearing an off-brand Black Falcon t-shirt.