Playbook: Wake Forest Demon Deacons vs Clemson Tigers

The Deacs followed up a less than stellar performance against Louisville with yet another blowout loss, this time to the Clemson Tigers. They did manage to shave a point off their previous deficit, this time only losing by 27 points, 37-64. Yes, you read that correctly, we managed to score 37 points in 40 minutes of basketball. In the last 2 games, Wake Forest is shooting a combined 32 for 127, or a whopping 25%. If you like bad stats, we’ve lost by a combined 55 points and only made 32 shots over the last 2 games—yikes.

Most of our poor offensive production can be traced to shot selection and a lack of passing. The Deacs are currently 332nd in the nation in field goal percentage, 344th in the nation in assists per game, and 320th in the nation in assists per field goals made. That’s not a good combo. If you want an example, look no further than the first possession from yesterday’s game.

It only got worse from there. I don’t want to take up too much of your time today with plays from a game that everyone probably wants to forget, so I’m just going to rapid fire a few that illustrate the point.

Seemingly every possession, we end up shooting a contested mid-range jump shot (which some might say is statistically the worst shot in the game), or we let the shot clock run down and end up heaving up an off-balance three. After the Duke game, I wrote “it seems our whole strategy is the player with the ball attempts to score 1 on 1 while everyone else watches. If he can’t score, he passes to someone else who proceeds to do the same thing...We hardly ever get an open look at the basket. Most of our shots are contested 1 on 1 moves followed by a forced shot.” That was almost a month ago, and save a handful of possession each game, nothing has really changed.

Juxtapose our offense with this Clemson possession, and it’s easy to see why we only scored 37 points in the whole game.