This year’s men’s basketball team is a different one than most years for head coach Brad Brownell, and he has seen the changes over the first five games of the season.
The Tigers are 4-1, coming off a 20-point win over the North Alabama Lions on Monday night at Littlejohn Coliseum. However, the team will be entering stretches with more top-quality opponents, and Brownell has already seen the team face some adversity.
In Monday night’s win, Clemson was outscored by three against the Lions in the second half, leaving the Tigers’ head coach with a sour taste in his mouth following the game.
“We just didn’t sustain, and we got to do better,” Brownell said after the game. “That’s human nature, but it’s not acceptable. We’re going to have very difficult games starting this weekend, and we’re going to have to play 40 minutes to win those kinds of games, but pleased to get a win, a 20-point win against a good team.”
The Tigers will head to Charleston, South Carolina, to compete in the Shriners Children’s Charleston Classic, a four-team tournament, to play West Virginia on Friday, followed by the winner or loser of the Georgia-Xavier game on Sunday.
Brownell says that the team will play advanced teams with a lot to break down, which will be another important test for the Tigers this weekend.
“We’ll have to deal with a lot more different things again,” he said. “I mean, you know, the Georgetown game, we saw different kinds of things.
“We saw a bunch of different presses and zones and man and aggressiveness and, tonight, they were more packed in and, you know, for a team that is still trying to figure each other out and figure out how to adjust, you can even see our older players like ‘We’re getting guarded this way. What are the adjustments?’ And some of the adjustments are like ‘Okay I need to flash fast,’” Brownell continued. “Like, we’re not making those things and it’s not happening fast enough for us to be quite as good as we need to be.”
10 new players are on this year’s team, meaning that there will be misunderstandings and growing pains that come up over the course of the season, especially in the beginning. Brownell took it on himself, saying that his coaching staff has to keep their team prepared for what’s to come for the rest of the calendar year.
“So, we just have got to keep coaching better and we’ve got to make it to where it’s second nature,” he said. “Those are things that, again, we’re going to get exposed down there against bigger, stronger athletes.”
The team features flashy players who have shown promise throughout the first five games and created popular plays that resonated with the Littlejohn Coliseum crowd so far. That’s the team that Brownell wants to commemorate, but he knows that there is much more that needs to be done.
Clemson will also see BYU, Alabama and South Carolina before officially beginning ACC play, meaning that Brownell needs to continue building positive habits, something he didn’t see in the second half of the North Alabama win.
“I said, ‘Guys, I don’t want to be this coach,’” Brownell said after the game. “I don’t want to be the mean guy that comes in and, you know, makes you feel bad after winning by 20. That’s not what we’re trying to do, but I’m also a realist of what this means, and this is not acceptable.
“You know, we’re habit building, whether we like it or not, good or bad,” he continued. “The second half was bad habit building, and that’s why it’s so hard to be good. The mentality you have to have and the maturity, and when you’re as new as we are, it makes that part of it even more challenging … it’s not easy for us to fix things as easy in games to fix things as maybe it has been the last couple of years.”
As the team heads down to the coast, Brownell is embracing the challenge that the team will face during this upcoming weekend. He hopes that the experience against Georgetown will help the Tigers turn the outcome in their favor.
“This would be another great two games for us to learn a lot about ourselves and grow, and I think the Georgetown game was disappointing,” Brownell continued. “We lost, I thought we played another really good first half, and just okay second, but it was a good experience for us.”
