By Will Vandervort.

By Will Vandervort

Rod Hall believes his team has a chance to win every time they touch the floor. So far he has been right.

With the exception of a 23-point loss at Coastal Carolina and a 28-point loss at Duke, Clemson has been in position in just about every game this season, including losses to No. 6 Arizona and No. 10 Gonzaga.

“I believe we can beat anyone we play, we just have to believe that as a team,” Hall said Wednesday as the Tigers get set to play at Florida State Thursday night.

And there in lies the problem. As much as Hall wants to win and knows they can win, Clemson isn’t getting it done when it matters most. The Tigers had several second-half leads against Gonzaga at the Old Spice Classic in Orlando, FL, but they sputtered down the stretch as the Zags won, 57-49. Two weeks later at home against Arizona, Clemson had the Wildcats on the ropes with a six-point lead midway through the second half before a scoring slump proved costly in a 66-54 defeat.

Then there was last Sunday’s game at then No. 14 NC State. After falling behind 10-0 to start the game, and by as many as 11 points several times throughout the night, the Tigers fought their way back and tied things up on a Milton Jennings three-pointer late in the game. But breakdowns on both the offensive and defensive ends down the stretch proved to be too much to overcome in a 66-62 loss.

“I think when you’ve lost a few games, you are not as confident, especially like in the NC State game where you are battling back all night and the coaches are telling you ‘We are playing well and we are going to have a chance if we just keep doing what we are doing,’” Clemson head coach Brad Brownell said.

Hall, who scored a career-high 16 points at NC State, says it’s the Tigers lack of focus or intensity at the start of games that is costing them late against elite level competition.

“We have to come out with the same intensity that we play with when we are down,” he said. “But we come out flat for much of the game and that automatically puts us in a hole. Everybody tries to make a play that’s going to turn the game around, but at the end of the game, there are always two or three possessions that we need that we cannot get back that we lost in the first half.”

Clemson (10-7, 2-3 ACC) did get those possessions back against the Wolfpack, but after Jennings’ three tied the game, two breakdowns on defense and an unfortunate play on offense turned the game back in NC State’s favor.

“All of sudden you look up at a timeout and you say, ‘Here we are fellas – winning time.’ We were just a play or two away from making a statement with a really big win,” Brownell said. “Those are tough things and they are not easy things to do. You work for 35 or 36 minutes to put yourself in position to win like that then you have to seize the opportunity and make plays.

“We had a couple of defensive breakdowns and we needed a shot or two to go. We had a little bit of an unfortunate break at the end with Rod slipping on a wet spot when we had a chance to tie, but you have to figure out ways and we made a couple of defensive errors and did not make a couple of plays offensively that we needed to make.”