NC State gets smoked at home by Clemson, 96-71

If you’d have given me two of these three home games, in whatever order, I’d have taken them—and yet. AND YET. Did you say that we were going to get blown out randomly by Clemson? Was that on the sticker price?

Oh well. I regret nothing. Not sure what it is that puts Clemson into nuclear-good mode against NC State, but so it goes, and we’ll see these guys again in the ACC tournament semifinals.

So what happened today, anyway? Clemson got off to a really fast start, which forced the issue on State, and while this is pretty much exactly what happened in the Wake game, State didn’t have the answering buckets early this time. So Clemson pulled away.

DJ Burns was excellent, but Jarkel Joiner struggled and Baby T once more barely merited notice, so the team had a bad day. I think for the most part State has done a good job not letting the offensive end bother them at the other, but I thought that was a noticeable problem Saturday. Bad time for that to be a problem when the other team wasn’t going to give you anything.

NC State fell behind by double figures almost immediately and never could quite figure out how to string together the handful of good possessions necessary to flip the energy in this game, and Clemson just kept making one dumb shot after another. State’s defense was not good, but Clemson’s dumb-shot making hit an elite level as well. Can’t do anything about that.