Comparing the North Carolina and Miami Games

Jan 6, 2024, 9:17 PM

What's interesting about these two losses is that they happened because of almost entirely opposite reasons. As has been discussed ad nauseam by now, the main reason for the Miami loss was the horrendous second half defense, as well as playing too fast and not involving PJ Hall inside enough. That style of play obviously benefitted Miami more than Clemson and led to the game getting out of reach. It has been speculated that Clemson was able to get by on some subpar defense against Queens and Radford that was masked by the high offensive output, and that this resulted in the players being caught off guard by how problematic things became against a far more prolific offense in Miami. The Tigers discovered the hard way that defense was not optional against the Canes. But in terms of overall offensive production, Clemson actually did pretty well. Usually, if you score over 80 points in a college game that should be more than enough to win. The problem was the defense was virtually nonexistent.

Now fast forward to today's game against UNC, and the situation was completely different. The defense in this game was largely very good. If you want to get nitpicky, you could argue that the rebounding could've been cleaner, but in a game as physical as this one was there's always bound to be a few that get away because of how highly contested everything is under the rim. Even so, Clemson still held their own quite well overall on the defensive boards and got plenty of rebounds (Schieffelin in particular, as usual). North Carolina did finish with significantly more boards in the end, but some of that can be attributed to Clemson's shooting woes.

You're almost never going to be able to completely shut down a team as good as UNC, but Clemson did as good a job of slowing them down defensively as I think anyone could've reasonably expected. Most positively, North Carolina is a very physical team in the interior with Bacot, and I thought Clemson did a great job of matching and at times exceeding the level of physicality and energy that Carolina played with, particularly on defense, which was a very welcome sign after the second half Miami debacle. Schieffelin, Hall, Godfrey, and Beadle in particular provided a lot of that intensity. In any case, Clemson's overall defense, physicality, and defensive rebounding was quite good. At the very least it should've been good enough to make the game winnable. These areas were not the problem today for the Tigers.

As we all know, the problem in this game was the offense. As good as Clemson was at playing physical defense today, the Tarheels were just as good. Godfrey and Hall struggled to score in the paint this afternoon more so than in any game I've seen them play all season. Again, part of this should be attributed to good defense by North Carolina. But the real killer was the perimeter shooting, which was inexplicably poor regardless of how good the defense was. 1 for 18 on threes is brutal. The Tigers actually got plenty of decent looks, but the shots just would not fall today. With the exceptions of Chase Hunter and Ian Schieffelin, no one else had a good scoring day for Clemson. But the two most crucial missing pieces were by far PJ Hall and Joe Girard, who scored just 10 and 5 points respectively. When your two leading scorers fall 19.5 combined points shy of their season averages in a game, it's going to be very difficult to win no matter what happens.

Indeed, in stark contrast to most of the previous games this season, what doomed the Tigers today was overall lack of offense, almost all of which can be attributed to the awful outside shooting and the major lack of scoring from Hall and Girard. Interestingly, Chase Hunter actually played very well in this game, leading all scorers with 17 points. With him going through a scoring slump so far this year, this was certainly a positive sign. He did put up back-to-back 16-point games against Radford and Miami, but truth be told, the Radford game was a blowout, and a decent chunk of his Miami points came in garbage time. Regardless, if you had told me before the game that Chase would finish with 17, I would've felt very good about Clemson's chances, as I thought he would play a pivotal role today against UNC's smaller guards, and I was hoping he could have a breakout game. In the end, he may very well have had a breakout game regardless, but unfortunately, it ended up being all for naught because the two other main sources of points disappeared as soon as Chase reemerged.

For what it's worth, while I am never happy with a loss, I was much less displeased with this game than I was with the Miami game, even with it being at home. The good thing about today's game was that Clemson showed they can play good defense against a quality opponent. It's also just a reality of basketball that sometimes bad shooting days are going to happen, as frustrating as they are, even when a team does most other things in a game well. Shooting, for the most part, is not something you can "fix" on a game-to-game basis, as long as the shot selection isn't exceedingly undisciplined. It's just a matter of practice and then playing the odds come game time to try to take the smartest shots, but you can't "force" outcomes regardless of how well you prepare. This is a common theme throughout all of sports, really.

But the point is, Clemson didn't really do anything "wrong" in today's game to cost themselves the win. The shots just wouldn't go down, and it's pretty much as simple as that. I'd prefer to see that than to see what happened in the Miami game, which was lost primarily because of a very poor effort defensively by the Tigers. Clemson has shown a world of potential, and they have shown that they can play good offense and good defense. The question now is can they do both of these things together and can they do it consistently for the rest of the season.

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down

thumb_up

Comparing the North Carolina and Miami Games

Two long scoring droughts...

Re: Comparing the North Carolina and Miami Games

Re: Comparing the North Carolina and Miami Games

Re: Comparing the North Carolina and Miami Games

Re: Comparing the North Carolina and Miami Games

TigerBoard POTD