You can't pluck Dillon Brooks' feathers now

The former Pac-12 player of the year has always played on the edge. Tuesday it came at quite the cost.

Was browsing through Reddit this morning and came across this post on R/Ducks: 

Dillon Brooks is Dirty 

As a Golden State Warriors fan he is no longer a Duck in my book…

The post is in reference to Dillon Brooks’ flagrant 2 foul on Gary Payton II last night, when Brooks clobbered Payton during a layup.

It was a dirty play that impacted the result of the game¹ and ended the best season of Payton’s career. 

“This should be the time of [Payton’s] life and the guy comes in and whacks him across the head mid-air,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr said after the game. “He broke the code. Dillon Brooks broke the code. That’s the way I see it.”

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GP2 takes a hard fall after getting fouled by Dillon Brooks. Brooks was given a Flagrant 2 foul and has been ejected from Game 2

I haven’t watched enough Memphis basketball the last five years to say that Dillon Brooks is a dirty NBA player — he certainly doesn’t draw the weekly, “Here’s what he did last night” headlines like Grayson Allen used to — but it’s pretty outlandish to pretend that plays like the one that happened in Memphis last night are completely out of character — even dating back to his days as a Duck. 

Brooks had an on-court temper from the start at Oregon.

When harnessed correctly, it made him one of the best players to ever play in Eugene. He led the Ducks to the Elite 8 and later the Final Four. He was the Pac-12 player of the year.

And everyone else in the country hated him.