By Will Vandervort.
After posting an 8-4 record in the non-conference part of its schedule, Clemson’s basketball team begins play in the Atlantic Coast Conference with a lot of question marks on whether it can handle a conference that starts off with five heavyweights.
Beginning with Saturday’s 8:15 p.m. tip against No. 19 North Carolina at Littlejohn Coliseum, the Tigers will play basketball bluebloods in the Tar Heels, Louisville, Virginia, Pittsburgh and Syracuse in consecutive games. Sandwiched between the Tigers’ home games with UNC and the Orange (Jan. 17), are three consecutive road games against No. 5 Louisville, No. 3 Virginia and Pittsburgh, who is off to a 10-3 start to the 2014-’15 basketball season.
“We are just taking it game-by-game,” forward Jaron Blossomgame said on Friday. “
That’s the best thing to do for a team that has been so up and down this year. Clemson has two wins over top 30 RPI teams in LSU and Arkansas, who was ranked No. 18 at the times, yet has lost to Winthrop and Gardner Webb.
“We are definitely a team that is still learning,” Blossomgame said. “We show stretches where we can play really good basketball, then there are stretches when we really don’t play so well. We have some young guys out there playing major minutes and we just have to figure out how to get everybody playing good basketball at the same time.”
Clemson comes into the game against the Tar Heels (10-3) riding a two-game winning streak following an embarrassing 23-point loss at South Carolina on Dec. 19. But in their wins over Oakland and Robert Morris, it’s not like the Tigers imposed their will. They beat Oakland by 10 points and then followed that with a seven-point victory over Robert Morris this past Tuesday.
“The thing we have to carry over is try to be more consistent and work on the things that caused us to lose those non-conference games and focus on the things that won us games and kind of bring it all together,” point guard Rod Hall said.
One thing the Tigers need to do better is take care of the basketball. Against Robert Morris they turned the ball over 17 times, while against Oakland they gave it away 12 times. North Carolina is averaging eight steals a game.
“Coach (Brad Brownell) has kind of talked about toughness and turnovers after the last game because we had 17 turnovers and the other team we played only had seven,” Hall said. “We kind of focused on that in practice.”
Brownell says being efficient has been a problem with this team. The statistics back that up. Clemson has turned the ball over 13.2 times a game, while they’re averaging 11.1 assists per outing.
“Some of it is we have been trying to feed the ball inside even more this year. Whether it is poor passing, post player not being able to hold position and having a post player that has never been a go-to guy, I think there are some problems there that have caused turnovers,” the Clemson coach said. “Probably over half of our turnovers are post feeding and trying to make plays that way. It is a little change in style of play just because of the change in our personnel this year.
“Our change in personnel has dictated that we try to do that in some games and some games it has been affective and Landry (Nnoko) has had some big games. Then in other games we had some problems, but there is no doubt it is something we have been talking about the last couple of weeks, especially after Christmas. We talked about how that is one area that has to improve and it did not improve against Robert Morris.”