Wake Forest 96, Clemson 88
Well, all the intangible factors I was worried about in the preview came to pass--North Carolina beat Duke and FSU beat VT, meaning Wake Forest was playing for a two seed and Clemson was locked in the five seed. That being said, I thought Clemson played pretty well--let's go to the chart:
(Chart from Statsheet. I can't find win probability charts, but this is pretty close. I assume they are using Bill James' formula to calculate safe leads, but I might be wrong.)
It was back-and-forth throughout much of the contest, with Clemson opening up a short-lived advantage late in the first half and Wake starting to pull away around the 7:00 mark. Even though the formula says we weren't out of it until 15 seconds to go, I felt it really slipping away around the 6:00 minute mark. It was almost like the players realized they had acquitted themselves pretty well, but were still staring down a double digit deficit late in the game.
Wake is the one team in the ACC Clemson doesn't come close to matching in terms of raw athleticism (I don't think any team in the ACC does, for that matter). It showed up in the stats last night--Wake outrebounded us and controlled the paint on both ends of the floor. The last point helped lead to a 63% (!) effective field goal percentage against and 30 FT attempts vs. just 15 for the Tigers. Results like that will make life incredibly hard for the opposing team. It didn't help that our halfcourt defense was incredibly porous, but I do think this was partly by design. It really looked like Clemson decided that while they couldn't do much against the big WF frontcourt, they would try to shut down Teague. I think it was definitely worth a shot, and it largely worked in their favor.
But let's be clear, I thought Clemson showed some life last night. I thought I was finally seeing some adjustments--the defense picked its spots to press (like when Teague was out of the game), resulting in some nice forced turnovers. On offense, Stitt was creating space for his teammates by driving to the hoop and Rivers was looking to shoot from different places on the court. I thought this (and a somewhat lazy half-court defensive effort from Wake--definitely not as crisp as the first game we played) led to some open looks and some feeds to Booker in the post that I haven't seen to much of lately. Maybe I'm looking too much for a bright side here, but after watching this game I feel a little better about our prospects for a tough ACC tourney draw. I just wish they had tried something like this against FSU last week, and we might be looking at the 4 seed now...
The big downside here is the loss yesterday probably drops us down near the 6/7 range in the NCAA tourney. A surprise first round loss to GT and suddenly we could be staring at the 8/9 seed of death (don't be fooled--the GT game is no gimme for Clemson. Not too mention it will be a bruising, physically draining game when you want to rest your players as much as possible...). Clemson needs to beat GT and probably FSU to ensure a 6 seed--the drop from 5 to 6 seed is not as damaging as the 6 to 7 seed. And as much as I've fretted about FSU and worried about the matchup problems they pose, we've played them close twice and its definitely a winnable game.
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