Virginia Tech 70, Clemson 59
I was actually pretty happy with the gameplan that Oliver Purnell assembled for Saturday. Clemson came out and used the press sparingly, a wise move since the Hokies protect the ball well and have historically shredded our press for easy points. Instead, we focused on playing aggressive half-court defense, trying to force the Hokies to beat us with their awful field goal percentage. On offense, we still looked pretty terrible but at least we looked for the three point shot early to try and soften up the inside for Booker. The main problem was that Oliver Purnell rightfully assumed the officiating would be the same that it's been all season, and Clemson would be able to throw some weight around inside the arc. Instead, we got the tightest-called game in recent memory and Clemson was essentially out of fouls to give on the inside by the ten minute mark. Coincidentally enough, that's about the point that VT started seizing control of the game as Clemson was forced to play tentatively underneath. Take a look at the chart:(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.)
Clemson's back was finally broken by the possession where we had three good looks at the basket to trim the lead to four but ended up instead fouling Delaney (surprise, surprise) after VT managed to tip the ball out to midcourt. Delaney promptly sank two more free throws, effectively a four point swing that stretched the VT lead to 8 with 3:39 to go. This set up the three point shot on the next possession that lifted VT's win probability over 30%. Clemson didn't look the same again and VT never looked back. If Potter goes up and dunks one of those shots instead of flailing away from the basket and missing a three foot fadeaway maybe I'm talking about a much different result.
Anyways, I'm finding it hard to fault the coaching staff here, unless the refs decided to call a tighter game because of all the talk about "physical play", which I commented on in part one of the recap below. They came out with a good gameplan which kept them in the game up until the point the referees, really an unforeseeable factor, whistled away any chance of victory.
I'm not ready to declare Clemson's NCAA candidacy dead. They still have time to turn it around but two things are clear now: 1) we have to win all four remaining home games (literally a tall task with FSU and GT yet to come to Littlejohn) and 2) there's probably no road game left on the schedule that will be easier than the trip we just made to Blacksburg. Given our relatively weak tournament resume, we really need to steal one of the final three road games to ensure a winning record in the ACC and an invite. I've been lobbying hard all season that the back half of our schedule is just as hard, if not harder than the front half because we struggled so badly last year against teams that share a general profile like FSU, GT, and Wake Forest. Our first game against GT this season was encouraging enough to give me some hope. But if we get shoved around by FSU and lose by five, its time to start the NIT countdown.
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