Salted Away: Clemson falls short of ACC Championship game
Clemson and Virginia traded blows early in the semifinals of the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament in Brooklyn, but Clemson needed to hang around for 40 minutes if it was going get back to its first ACC championship game in ten years.
An early Virginia run was all it took for the top-ranked Cavaliers to advance to their first ACC Championship since 2014 beating upset-minded Clemson 64-58.
Virginia was led by its first-team All-ACC player Kyle Guy, who had 15. Devon Hall and Mamadi Diakite had ten points apiece as well.
Clemson was led by Shelton Mitchell’s game-high 18 points and Elijah Thomas, who had 15 points and seven rebounds.
Early in the contest, the Tigers trailed Virginia 13-12, but Clemson scored eight unanswered points taking a 20-13 lead with 9:32 left in the first half.
Following a Tony Bennett timeout, the top-seeded Cavs began to flex their muscles.
They put together a 16-0 run to push their lead to 32-23 at halftime, holding Clemson scoreless from the field the rest of the half. Virginia is a boa constrictor to its opponents and had the Tigers in a suffocating chokehold for much of the night on the defensive end.
"I just think that they do what they do, and they just keep doing it better, and they don't ever back off," Brownell said. "They play like this every day. You go 17-1 it's because you don't have many bad days, effort and execution."
Clemson shot 35-percent from the field all night and only made five of its 25 attempted 3-point attempts. Amidst Virginia’s defense, Clemson started to press a bit offensively and settled for outside, contested jump shots.
Given Virginia’s defensive prowess, any hope to make a comeback was certainly slim, but no one told that to Elijah Thomas.
Thomas fueled the Tigers out of the half after Clemson got him the ball inside. He scored Clemson’s first nine points of the second half, seven of which came during a 7-2 run that brought the Tigers within four points of Virginia, 34-30 with 16:17 left.
"I mean, he was the guy that got us going, and then it kind of loosened a few things up for these guys," Brownell said of Thomas. "It just gave us a little bit of confidence knowing that he could make a couple buckets."
Once again the ACC Coach of the Year's squad had an answer and this time squeezed the Tigers on the defensive end while piecing together a 10-0 run of their own giving the Cavaliers their largest lead of the night at fourteen.
Trailing 44-30, Clemson could have folded, but unlike the previous matchup in Charlottesville, the Tigers keep chipping away.
Led by Mitchell and Thomas, Clemson managed to put together a 13-4 stretch, trimming the UVA lead to five on multiple occasions late.
But back-to-back buckets from big man Jack Salt extended Virginia's lead back up to nine at 54-45 with 5:01 left.
Reed dropped in a huge three cutting the lead to six with 3:50 remaining, but was immediately answered by Devon Hall, who hit a three of his own. Clemson kept it at six but couldn't get much closer as Virginia continued to respond.
Salt responded with a follow-up tip-in and after Gabe DeVoe split a pair of free throws, Ty Jerome hit a fadeaway jumper as the shot clock expired giving Virginia a 61-52 lead.
Even still, Clemson wasn’t done and used a 6-1 run to get as close a four points late at 62-58 before a few clutch Cavalier free throws salted the game and Clemson’s ACC Championship game hopes away.
If you’re a Clemson fan, you’re wondering what the game would have been like if Reed found any rhythm. Virginia knew Reed was the man who got Clemson going offensively and did a good job of keeping him off the scoreboard.
The second-team All-ACC point guard had six points while shooting 2-for-14 from the field, 1-of-10 from beyond the arc.
A possible ACC championship would have been nice for a Clemson team that has exceeded so many expectations this season, but now the Tigers get to go home, rest an extra day and await their seeding for the NCAA Tournament.
Selection Sunday begins at 6:00 PM on March 11th.