Outside of a very unlikely NIT invitation, Wake Forest’s season officially came to an end tonight with a 62-71 loss to Clemson in the ACC Tournament. For the 20th season in a row, Wake Forest failed to win more than 1 game at the ACC Tournament, meaning that the Deacs will miss the first round of the NCAA Tournament for the 16th year in a row.
Whereas the VT game was something we had not seen from the Deacs this season, tonight’s game against the Tigers was very familiar.
All of the problems that plagued Wake during the regular season—mainly 3-point defense, rebounding, and depth—popped back up, resulting in the Deacs trailing by double digits for most of the game.
This one was more or less decided half way through the first half. The Tigers went on a 19-6 run over an 8 minute span that put the Deacs in a 17 point hole, and Wake never got the gap closer than 8 points. The Deacs were once again aggressively helping on drives and in the post, and Clemson was making the extra pass to find shooters wide open from beyond the arc. The Tigers simply could not miss in the first half—Clemson, who entered the game making 8 3-pointers per game at a 34% rate, made 9 of their 18 3-point attempts in the first 20 minutes of the game. With Wake shooting just 36% from the field and turning the ball over 7 times in the 1st half, they simply had no chance keeping the game close at the break.
The shooting streaks seem to switch at halftime, as the Deacs made 7 of their 12 3-pointers in the 2nd half and Clemson was just 1-13. That allowed Wake to draw back within as few as 8 points, but they never could get enough stops to get any closer. The main reason they couldn’t get any stops is that Wake simply couldn’t secure a rebound for anything in the 2nd half. Wake allowed the Tigers to pull down 11 offensive rebounds in the 2nd half, and that doesn’t even count the times that Clemson retained possession simply because Wake just lost the ball out of bounds. This was a massive problem for the Deacs all season, so perhaps its only fitting that its the way the season ended.
Wake got a much better game from Juke Harris tonight, but the balanced scoring from the Virginia Tech game was definitely missing. Harris, Nate Calmese, and Trevon Spillers combined to score 57 of Wake’s 62 points—Omaha Biliew and Sebastian Akins accounted for the remaining 5 points. Myles Colvin, Mekhi Mason, and Cooper Schwieger played a combined 62 minutes and did not score a single point. A team isn’t going to pull off very many upsets when over half of the players who get in the game score just 5 total points.
The dream of the miracle ACC Tournament run is officially dead, and while the team has indicated that they will accept an NIT bid if they get one, I have a hard time seeing the 13th best team in the ACC getting an invite, especially with Wake likely being the team that popped the bubbles of VT, Cal, and Stanford. Barring a bunch of teams declining to play in the NIT, the 2025-26 Wake Forest basketball season—which started with so much promise and hope—mercifully comes to an end with the Deacs losing 16 games for the 2nd time in Forbes’ tenure.
Despite the season being over, Wake won’t have a lot of time off. Next season will start in just a couple of weeks, when the chaos of the transfer portal starts spooling up. The Deacs need to do a much better job this year on composing their roster if they want to avoid meeting a similar fate at the end of next season. A large part of the roster construction will likely depend on the decision of Juke Harris, who will likely test the NBA waters and have a ton of offers to transfer to other schools. We will have to wait and see what he decides in the coming weeks.
Go Deacs.
