Clemson basketball is here to save us from the pain and heartache of Clemson football. I bet you didn’t see that coming three months ago, did you? Now we’ll hope to do better predicting the season than
we did for football.
Clemson basketball has their ups-and-downs. The highs can be quite glorious. Last year they delivered a memorable win over Cooper Flagg’s Duke Blue Devils in Littlejohn Coliseum. Duke ended up reaching the Final Four and Cooper Flagg was taken 1st overall in the NBA draft. Clemson beat that team! The Tigers largely dominated the ACC regular season with an 18-2 conference record, the best in school history.
Unfortunately, Clemson’s basketball’s lows are quite embarrassing. Despite going 18-2 Clemson didn’t win the ACC regular season because they lost in 3OT at home to a bad Georgia Tech squad. They finished behind Duke and tied with Louisville. They didn’t do much in the ACCT, beating SMU and then losing to Louisville. The Tigers ended their year with a brutal loss to McNeese in the NCAA Tournament Round of 64. McNeese’s coach, Will Wade, is a Clemson graduate who has since taken the NC State job and seems poised to be a thorn in the side of Clemson basketball for a long time.
So, last year was simultaneously the most impressive conference performance in school history and also a year where the only banner that’ll hang in Littlejohn is one for a brief NCAA “appearance.”
Unlike Clemson football, which also had a “playoff appearance” last year, the basketball team doesn’t return a bunch of starters. In fact, they only returned one, Dillon Hunter. If football has taught us anything it is roster continuity isn’t everything. The basketball program actually went out and used the portal to bring in mulitple quality starters, I know a novel idea. As a result, this team could return to the NCAA tournament for the third straight season. That would be a major accomplishment and a reasonable goal for this season.
Below is Clemson’s full schedule with KenPom opponent rankings and game grades as well as my game-by-game predictions. They’re not exactly Quad 1/Quad 2/etc., but they’re a loose proxy for that. Clemson has a 21% to 61% chance to win in the games graded as “A games” with the trip to Duke being the overall toughest contest on the schedule. The “B games” are a bit more positive with 49% to 77% win expectancy and the games listed as C (KenPom leaves those ungraded, but I added C for clarity) are all 80% or more:
My predictions in the right-most column sum to a 10-2 non-conference performance and a 12-6 ACC record. That combined for a 22-8 record overall.
I worry that the non-conference could be worse if the team doesn’t gel fast enough. They literally don’t have two players who were on the same team last year so it will have to come together somewhat quickly. Carter Welling had an offseason foot injury that may have slowed down that process too. We shall see. Fortunately, they have a bit of a runway with three “C games” to start the season and no “A games” until December 3rd.
In ACC play, 12-6 would put Clemson in the running for a top 4 seed and a double-bye in the ACC tournament. I see Duke, Louisville, and NC State as likely better than Clemson, but they could be right there behind them. In addition to losses at Duke and UNC and at home to NC State and Louisville, I also project upset losses at Syracuse and Stanford. I think Syracuse has a chance to be much improved after swiping PG Naithan George from Georgia Tech in the portal. I don’t have such optimism for Stanford, but that game will be played at 10:00pm on a weeknight in California which is a big disadvantage for Clemson and a ridiculous situation.
Overall, a 22-win season would likely put the Tigers in the tournament for a third-straight season. It has only been done twice in school history and never by Brownell. If he can do it despite losing his entire roster other than Dillon Hunter it will be a major success and a step forward for this basketball program.
