Wake Forest Stomps Charleston Southern 95-59

The Wake Forest Men’s Basketball Team improved the 3-0 on Wednesday after a 95-59 beat down of the Charleston Southern Buccaneers. As previously mentioned in the pre-game article, Charleston Southern is rated as one of the worst teams in the nation by KenPom (337), so this result was pretty expected. The only team on Wake’s schedule with a lower KenPom ranking is USC Upstate (334), who the Deacs will play on December 11th.

As this game was out of hand after about the first 8 minutes, I’ll keep this recap pretty short. The Deacs were led by Indiana State transfer Jake Laravia, who finished the game with 24 points on 10-14 shooting. Unlike the previous game against Western Carolina, the Deacs were much more balanced in their scoring tonight—Wake finished with 5 players in double figures, including 4 of the 5 starters. The only starter who did not scored double digits was senior Isaiah Mucius, who has yet to get his shot going this season. He finished with 5 points on 2-5 shooting, but I feel confident he will get things going eventually. Freshman Cam Hildreth continues to impress in his first year with Wake—he added 9 points, 8 rebounds, and 4 assists off the bench in the win. Some congratulations are in order tonight as senior Daivien Williamson scored his 1000th career point and redshirt senior Miles Lester scored his first bucket as a Deacon on a deep 3-pointer with about a minute remaining in the game.

Offensively, this was nearly a perfect game for Wake Forest. The Deacs finished shooting 56% from the floor and a red hot 10-21 (48%) from beyond the arc. Wake really pushed the tempo tonight and shared the ball extremely well, assisting on 20 of their 35 made baskets. Despite the increased tempo, the Deacs only turned the ball over 10 times, which is a big improvement over the first two games. Wake also did a much better job as compared to the season opener not getting complacent with a big lead and losing focus.

Typically, we don’t learn much about the team when they blowout their opponent in games where they are supposed to blowout the opponent, but it still looks like the Deacs are improving game to game so far this season. Hopefully we can get a few more blowouts before conference play starts—it wasn’t that long ago that Wake was struggling in these kinds of games.