The Deacs were back in action on Tuesday for their 2nd Quad 4 buy game of the season, and it went pretty much exactly as expected.
Personally, it’s hard to really learn anything about the team or feel any form of excitement from anything that happens in these buy games against 300+ level KenPom opponents, but I’ll just throw out a few thoughts I had during the game. This was the first game of the season where Gavin Placide truly looked like a freshman.
I don’t know if the length of Charleston Southern’s Lase Olalere (6-10) and Mathok Majok (7-4) were giving him issues, but he seemed hesitant to shoot the ball when he got it in the paint. That wasn’t unique to Placide, as the rest of the Wake Forest big men did not play particularly well either—Placide finished with 14 points on 5-15 shooting, while the rest of the bigs finished with a combined 8 points on 3-12 shooting.
Despite Wake leading pretty much the whole game and never being in danger of losing this one, offensively, they didn’t really play that well. The Deacs shot just 42% from the field and finished the game with just 13 assists—Wake was able to put up 82 points mostly due to grabbing 17 offensive rebounds and outscoring the Buccaneers in 2nd chance points 17-6. Dominating the offensive glass is always a good thing, but based on the past few seasons, its pretty clear Wake is not going to be able to rely on that against better teams. Even with the Wake cleaning the boards, they still only outscored Charleston Southern by 10 points in the paint, 32-22.
On the defensive end, the Deacs kind of lost focus in the 2nd half and allowed the Bucs to shoot 61% from the floor and 50% from beyond the arc—Charleston Southern scored 42 of their 64 points in the second half. Losing intensity and coasting is always a danger in these buy games, especially when a team leads by as much 29, but allowing a team voted to finish 7th in the Big South this season to score 42 points in a single half is a pretty big red flag.
There were some positives from the game as well. The Deacs had 5 players score in double figures and got 35 points off the bench. They forced 23 CSU turnovers and converted them into 31 points. The 3-point shooting was also good—despite Xander Pintelon’s ongoing slump (2-8), Wake still shot 38.5% from beyond the arc. Being able to put the ball in the basket from deep is usually fairly independent of the opponent, so hopefully that will continue through the rest of the season.
Go Deacs!
