By Will Vandervort.

By Will Vandervort

CLEMSON — All Adonis Filer’s father wanted for his birthday Tuesday was for his son to put on show against The Citadel. Filer gave his father what he wanted.

The freshman scored a career-high 21 points on 7 of 7 shooting in leading Clemson to a 92-51 victory at Littlejohn Coliseum.

“I just did what I could,” a modest Filer said afterwards.

Filer’s play was not modest, however. With Clemson in front 64-42 with 10:36 to play, he stripped The Citadel’s Janeil Jenkins and then made a perfect tomahawk dunk that brought the 7,124 at Littlejohn to their feet.

“All my teammates have been telling me to dunk for them,” the freshman said.

Filer’s steal was one of 16 by the Tigers (8-4), who forced 25 turnovers and scored 44 points off of those. Filer had three steals himself.

Of his 21 points, he also made four three-pointers.

“As good as that was and him making the open shots, I just really liked his energy and spark defensively,” Clemson head coach Brad Brownell said. “I thought he really got after the ball-handler, pressured the ball and got our defense going a little bit just because of his competitive spirit and how hard he plays.

“That is his greatest strength right now as a young player. He wants to win and he wants to compete and he is not afraid. It’s a huge help to our team when he can make shots like that. He is probably a little streaky right now as a shooter, but certainly we need him to have some games like this if we are going to beat good teams in our league.”

Filer is also coming off the bench to help Clemson’s tempo, which for the second straight game was getting up and down the floor. The Tigers shot 61.4 percent from the field, with 44 of the 92 points coming in the paint.

At one point, Clemson had a stretch of five straight possessions with either a dunk or a layup.

“That’s really what Coach Brownell wants us to do,” Filer said. “He wants us to keep pushing it more, more, more and more and that goes with our defensive rebounding. Once we get a stop, we have to get the rebound and push it and that’s kind of what he has been wanting us to do.”

Brownell says he has been trying to play faster on offense, but sometimes the players have not been wanting to because they get tired.

“We have pressed a little bit more against teams when we feel like we have are better because we want to speed the game up and that kind of stuff a little bit, especially at home,” he said. “I don’t know if we will do as much of that in ACC play, I think when you play better competition and faster guards, guys are going to make you pay for pressing at times so you have to be really careful with that.”

But if young guards like Filer and Jordan Roper, who tallied 13 points and had two assists, keep improving, this Clemson team might just become a run-and-gun team, built with a defense that is already one of the best in the ACC.

“It was really a good game for us offensively, but I don’t know if we were locked in as we needed to be at times,” Brownell said. “We gambled a little bit and created a lot of turnovers, but we did not play as sound defensively as I would have liked.

“But moving into conference play, it is good to see us shoot the ball well and make shots and have a convincing win in a good offensive performance.”