It is crazy to think that spraining a knee can ever be a good thing for a player, but that might be the case for Clemson guard Marcquise Reed.

It’s not that Reed’s performance on the floor has been bad this season. The senior is currently third in the ACC in scoring at 19.4 points per game and is shooting 47 percent from the field, while averaging 5.1 rebounds per game.

However, Reed’s leadership is where he needed to grow the most this year and since spraining his knee in Clemson’s win over St. Peter’s on Dec. 4, the guard is seeing things in a new light.

Brad Brownell’s wife, along with several other people in New Jersey for last week’s game against Mississippi State, noticed how Reed was coaching up his teammates from the sideline during the game and during timeouts.

“Marcquise is right there in front of our team coaching his tail off and talking,” Brownell said on Friday as the Tigers get set to host Radford at 3 p.m., Saturday at Littlejohn Coliseum in Clemson. “I talked to him this week that ‘I heard you more last Saturday than I have the whole season.’ He was like, ‘yeah, it is different over here. You see things much differently.’”

Brownell said he could see the frustration on Reed’s face when some of his teammates were not playing the way the should during Clemson’s loss to Mississippi State last week.

“You can see the frustration that he felt sometimes is the frustration we feel when he sees mistakes that we have gone over and sees plays that we should be making that we are not making,” the Clemson head coach said. “It is much easier from the side to see it than when you are in the heat of battle.

“Hopefully, that will be a good thing from this.”

The Clemson coaches are hopeful Reed will become a little more vocal on the court when he returns in a few weeks. Brownell said Reed will be out for the Radford game and likely will miss next week’s games against Charleston Southern and South Carolina.

“Hopefully, Marcquise is going to get a little more vocal. He is not naturally that way,” Brownell said. “He does want to contribute to the team while he is hurt so he feels like that is his way right now, and it really is. He is really trying to help the guys.

“We certainly want him back on the floor, but in the meantime, this has been good for him. I think it will be and I think it will be even more urgency with him when he gets healthy.”