YouTube Gold: The Alaskan Assassin!

When we learned Sunday that Trajan Langdon’s sister, Trista, had taken on a new position with the Washington Football Team, we thought it was a good time to do a YouTube Gold with brother Trajan.

As you may remember, or maybe not, Langdon was a freshman at Duke during the infamous 1994-95 season when Duke crashed and burned as Coach K took a leave of absence.

He sat out his sophomore year with a knee injury before getting back to it and ultimately becoming part of a great team in 1999, perhaps the best ACC team to not win a national championship.

Langdon had a three-year NBA career before moving to Europe, where he had a terrific run.

More recently he has, like his sister, moved into pro sports management. He was a scout for the Spurs, then an assistant GM for Brooklyn before being hired by the New Orleans Pelicans.

In retrospect, he was a beautiful basketball player. His shot was gorgeous and he generally refused to get overtly emotional on the court.

There was one glaring exception: for some reason we never understood, in either 1998 or 1999, when NC State came over, the entire Duke team really seemed to have it in for NC State’s Adam Harrington, not least of all Langdon.

For the most part, Langdon was as regal as his name would suggest, the King of Cool.

Not this time.

For whatever reason, he just seemed to have a desire to nearly bully Harrington and so did most of his teammates. It was as if someone had painted a bullseye on his State jersey.

Harrington ended up in the NBA briefly and spent time with the Mavericks. Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, hilariously, said this or nearly so anyway: “the guys like him and someone has to get the doughnuts.”