Clemson’s men’s basketball team became whole again Saturday. Now the Tigers are streaking into the ACC Tournament.

Clemson closed out the regular season with a 63-59 win over Virginia Tech at Littlejohn Coliseum. PJ Hall returned from a two-week hiatus to lead four Tigers in double figures with 12 points while junior guard Alex Hemenway added 11 for Clemson, which will take a four-game winning streak into next week’s tournament in Brooklyn.

“Our guys hung in there and just kept battling just like we’ve done here down the stretch and walked away with a really good, tough win,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said. “Happy for our seniors to win like this on a day when you’ve got a lot of emotion.”

Clemson (16-15, 8-12 ACC) held its largest lead at 50-44 with 10:08 remaining after a 7-0 run capped by Ian Schieffelin’s jumper, but four free throws were the only points the Tigers mustered over the next 5 minutes and change. Hall ended the drought with a layup that gave Clemson a 56-54 lead with 3:57 left.

Buckets were hard to come by for both teams down the stretch with Clemson clinging to a 60-59 lead with just 44 ticks left after a pair of free throws by Tech’s Justyn Mutts. But the Tigers executed late coming out of a timeout when Tech tried to trap point guard Nick Honor near midcourt as he brought the ball up the floor.

Honor found Hunter Tyson just above the free-throw line, and the Tigers’ senior forward, playing perhaps his final game at Littlejohn, knocked down a mid-range jumper to extend the lead. Tech (19-12, 11-9) missed its last seven shots, including five 3-pointers, as Clemson matched its longest winning streak of the season.

“We knew that a trap was probably going to come, so we needed to get into three different outlets,” Tyson said. “It’s three different options for Nick to pass the ball, so I was just that middle outlet. I was open, turned  around and saw I had a lane, so I just took a couple of dribbles, jumped up there and knocked it in.”

Playing for the first time since reaggravating his foot injury against Louisville two weeks earlier, Hall scored just two points in four minutes in the first half before he got going in the second. The Tigers’ sophomore big got off nine shots, making five of them, and pulled down four rebounds in just 13 minutes.

Brownell said Hall likely would’ve played a few more minutes if not for foul trouble, but Clemson ultimately wants its leading scorer feeling good enough to give it a go when the Tigers open conference tournament play Tuesday.

“Wasn’t going to put him back out there for 30 minutes right away,” Brownell said. “Now he won’t do anything Sunday. He probably won’t do much Monday and hopefully he’ll be able to give us something on Tuesday.”

It was the first time Hall and Tyson, who returned to the lineup earlier in the week after missing eight games with a broken clavicle, were simultaneously available since Clemson’s win over Florida State on Feb. 2. That put two of the Tigers’ top three scorers on the floor together for the first time in more than a month.

But with Tyson struggling for most of the game (five points on 2 of 7 shooting in 25 minutes), Clemson got more significant contributions from its guards to help pick up the slack. Hemenway scored all of his points off the bench, finishing 4 of 4 from the field and 3 of 3 from beyond the arc. Al-Amir Dawes and senior David Collins, playing his final game at Littlejohn, each chipped in 10 points for Clemson, which shot 43.8% from the field and 40% from 3-point range to deal a major blow to Tech’s NCAA Tournament at-large hopes.

“(Hemenway) probably hasn’t played as well as we thought he would or that he would like, but today we needed him bad,” Brownell said. “When he does that, that’s a huge shot in the arm for us.”

The Hokies, who had won three straight games and nine of their last 10 coming in, were paced by Nahiem Alleyne’s 17 points.

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