CHARLOTTE — Chase Hunter was in disbelief.
The Clemson guard stood there and looked at ACC official Ted Valentine with his arms up, wondering what had just happened and why he was not on the foul line.
Seconds before, Hunter drove the lane and appeared to draw contact from Louisville’s Aboubacar Traore and James Scott, which should have sent the First Team All-ACC guard to the free throw line with an opportunity to tie the game with eight seconds to play.
Instead, Valentine swallowed his whistle and let things play out, as Traore was credited with a block shot and Terrence Edwards the rebound.
“Yeah, that’s not up to me. I really tried to make a play, and it just didn’t go my way,” Hunter said.
The last play was indicative of the 10th-ranked Tigers’ entire night in Friday’s 76-73 loss to No. 13 Louisville in the ACC Tournament Semifinals at the Spectrum Center. They battled, they made a frantic comeback in the final three and a half minutes, but they just could not make enough plays to get over the top.
It was a frustrating night to say the least.
“You know, I guess it’s just competitiveness,” forward Ian Schieffelin said, as he came to the postgame press conference with his game jersey partially torn and missing the “E” and “M” in “Clemson” across the front of his jersey. “You just want to win every game. It hurts. This is my last ACC Tournament, and obviously, you want to win it.
“We kind of just ran out of steam, I guess, but, you know, we still got more basketball to play, so we’ve got to move on.”
The Tigers (27-6), who saw their nine-game win streak snapped, now wait and see what the NCAA Selection Committee has in store for them in next week’s tournament. Clemson will learn its destination and seeding for the NCAA Tournament during Sunday’s selection show at 6 p.m.
“I would say we’re motivated. We know we’re a great team,” Hunter said. “If we just go out there and play the way we’re supposed to play, I think we can compete with anybody in the country. Yeah, we’re ready for our next battle.”
Clemson, however, likely cannot do what it has done in the last several games if it wants to make a tournament run like it did last season when it advanced to the Elite Eight. The Tigers have gotten into a pattern of getting off to slow starts before finally picking up steam late.
Friday night, they found themselves down 15 points with 3:28 to play before finally getting things in gear and pulling within two points, 75-73, with 25 seconds to play and with the basketball.
“I thought defensively, we did a lot of good things. But I could just sense frustration with our guys,” Clemson head coach Brad Brownell said. “I was just reminding them from the six to eight-minute mark on that this is a long game. There’s a lot of possessions left.
“Obviously, it didn’t look good when we were down 15, but this is basketball…it’s the craziness of March and basketball in general. When you have a couple good players that can make plays, the game can flip quickly. We obviously did that here in the last three minutes.”
In the end, as Hunter indicated when he stared down Valentine after the no-call with six seconds to play, it was a frustrating night for Clemson.