Clemson Blows Past Citadel, 92-51

First, I want to say I was extremely impressed by the play of the freshmen, Roper, Filer, and Nnoko. Josh Smith had some good production there at the end, too. It wasn't a perfect game, but Filer pretty much had a perfect game himself, going 7-7, with 4-4 from 3, and then shot 3-4 from the foul line. That's good for 21 points, a team high tonight. The best part is, he did all of that in 19 minutes of playing time. Surprisingly, Nnoko and Smith were the leading rebounders, both pulling in a combined 7 rebounds on the night.

There was pretty even production from most of the players this game. The team shot 62% on the night, and shot a respectable 76% from the line. There was a lot of good penetration on offense, which is great to see but is probably due to the lack of size for the Citadel. Clemson also only attempted 14 3-pointers, which is much closer to what we want to see out of this team. McDaniels impressively racked up 9 pts, 3 rebounds, 2 steals, and a block without playing in the first half. McDaniels was benched for the first half for showing up late to a team gathering.

Defensively, the Tigers held the Citadel to a respectable 51 points, and only allowed 3 made 3-pointers on 12 attempts. Overall a solid defensive performance by Clemson.

I'm still not sure why Brownell pulled out the full-court press early on in the first half and then inexplicably quit after having some success with it. My only thought is that he did it just to gain momentum before the Citadel could. We looked confident in our man-to-man defense and full-court press, and offensively the team had good motion and made a lot of good decisions and very few poor ones, which is why we scored 92 points. Brownell took every chance he could to give the younger guys more playing time, which worked out pretty well.