Clemson Basketball Season – Unsatisfyingly Successful?
· Yahoo Sports
Following a Round of 64 loss to 9-seed Iowa, Clemson basketball season is over. As we look back, it’s clear they did a remarkable job building a tournament team from a mostly empty roster. As remarkable as it was, it doesn’t feel satisfying.
The Tigers finished 5th in the ACC at 12-6 and made the NCAA tournament. They generally exceeded most expectations in a year with extreme roster turnover (we had them pegged for exactly 12-6, but we were above most). Coach Brownell and the staff did a great job avoiding a true “rebuilding” year in an era where there’s no excuse for that anymore. Injuries and investment limitations put a hard ceiling on what this team could do and that was made clear in the NCAA tournament.
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The 24-win mark
Clemson finished the year 24-11. It is down from last year when they were 27-7 and essentially matches 2024 when they were 24-12. Reaching 24 wins is uncommon for Clemson basketball though. Before this three-year run, Brownell had only done it once (2018) meaning his teams have hit the 24-win mark four times. Oliver Purnell and Cliff Ellis each did it twice. If you go beyond that, the seasons were shorter and nobody did it including the 1980 Elite Eight team.
Clemson reached 24 wins for the 8th time in school history. The trendline is still up, but now it gets harder as spending gaps widen.
— Ryan Kantor (@ryan_kantor) March 21, 2026
(Orange at the bottom indicates NCAA tourney year). pic.twitter.com/JWdrJWbqNL
Funding Insufficiency
Where Clemson football has institutional advantages over schools like UConn, Kentucky, Kansas, Duke, UNC, and Louisville in football, the opposite is true in basketball. Not only do these schools have rich “blue blood” history and a cadre of NBA alumni, but they have more money. Specifically, they are giving a bigger share of their House Settlement revenue sharing dollars to basketball. Duke has somehow made this work so they won the ACC in both sports, but for the others it hurts the football program. Not only is it hard for Clemson to beat out schools like Louisville for top freshman like Mikel Brown or top transfers like Isaac McNeely because of prestige and track record, but now it is hard to match dollar for dollar what the top schools can pay.
Perhaps this should change as we look forward and see which Clemson programs turn dollars into wins more efficiently, but as it stands the football team makes all the profit — men’s basketball is lucky to break even — so purely from a capitalist perspective anything basketball gets is a bonus.
The strength of our team is the team
This led Coach Brownell to build a team centered on depth, grit, and team basketball rather than star power. They are essentially the polar opposite of a team like Alabama. The Crimson Tide are 3rd in offensive efficiency and 65th in defensive efficiency. They have Labaron Philon averaging 22 points per game in an up-tempo offense. He’ll be a first round draft pick. Their next best player is not playing in the NCAA tournament because of serious drug charges and they still advanced.
Clemson brought in players from Middle Tennessee St., Nevada, Utah Valley, UAB, Georgia, and Utah. Only Nick Davidson, who averaged 15.8 points, could have been considered a star and even that might have been a stretch. The beauty of the team was they played like a team. They were 23rd in defensive efficiency not because of elite shot blocking (they were 190th in Block%), but because of effort and attention to detail. That’s commendable.
Lacking sufficient skill
Unfortunately, they just didn’t have the upside to do a whole lot more than they did. Injuries took away arguably their two most athletic players before the NCAA tournament. Zac Foster was a true freshman guard that showed flashes of elite playmaking ability. He was fairly inefficient posting the lowest offensive rating on the team, but over the course of the year he could have developed into the go-to guy when they needed to break a drought. The other was Carter Welling. He only shot .293 from 3, but he led the team in blocks, block percentage, and both offensive and defensive rebounding percentage.
Even putting injuries aside, this was Clemson’s worst 3-point shooting team since the 2020 (COVID) year when they had Tevin Mack shooting 166 3-pointers at an atrocious 28.3% clip and finished at 31.5% as a team. This year they finished at 34.1% and only 34.4% in ACC play which was 11th in the conference. Their bread and butter was attacking in the paint, but eventually teams realized they’d miss 3-pointers even if they were open and sagged inside.
Nick Davidson was the biggest addition from the transfer portal and he had some good moments and was overall a good player for the Tigers, but he wasn’t a star. He finished the year at 9.1 points per game on 21.9 minutes per game. Both of those marks are a step down from his sophomore and junior seasons at Nevada.
Dillon Hunter improved each year at Clemson, but he seemed to hit his ceiling mid-way through this season. After averaging 9.3 points per game during non-conference play, that fell back down to 6.5 points per game during conference play (plus the Iowa game). He finished at 7.5 points per game, up 2.1 from a year ago. When accounting for minutes played, it was only up 0.9 points per 40 minutes from a year ago.
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Best Moments
This team had six wins that stood out to me.
- Thrilling overtime win in Charleston against eventual 8-seed Georgia (97-94)
- Rivalry win over the Gamecocks (68-61)
- Heart pounding hang on for dear life win vs. Cincinnati in Greenville where they nearly blew a 20+ point lead right after blowing a big lead against BYU. Dillon Hunter’s clutch FTs saved them. (68-65)
- Impressive home win over eventual 7-seed Miami (69-59)
- Impressive home win over eventual 6-seed Louisville (80-75)
- Emotional ACC tournament win over eventual 6-seed North Carolina after Carter Welling’s injury. UNC got red-hot late and Dillon Hunter’s 4-4 FT performance at the end saved them from collapse.
The Cincinnati win seemed to give this team confidence and belief and may have been the most exciting. The win over Miami was really satisfying to enjoy in-person and the UNC victory gave me hope that an opening round loss in the NCAA tournament wasn’t a forgone conclusion without Welling. Which was your favorite.
The worst moments to me was the back-to-back losses to Wake Forest and Florida State. Wake Forest was unreasonably hot from 3, but Clemson’s defense was sloppy. Florida State benefitted from a tightly called game where Robert McCray scored 29 points and real defensive resistance was called a foul. Then of course was the Iowa game.
NCAA Tournament Loss
More so than any other college sport, what you do in the tournament defines your year and Clemson trailed the entire way against Iowa. The Tiger defense was excellent and held star Bennett Sturtz 16 points on 4-17 shooting. It was exactly the defensive performance from Butta Johnson and Dillon Hunter we hoped for and expected. What we didn’t see coming was the poor rebounding. Clemson was 20th in defensive rebounding percentage on year. Even after losing Carter Welling, their top rebounder, they still allowed just 11 offensive rebounds to North Carolina and Duke combined. They allowed 12 to Iowa and those second chance points were the difference in the game.
Clemson’s offensive struggles against a good defensive opponent are not shocking, but the lack of rebounding was and that’s why the season ended on a disappointing note.
Superlatives
Best Offensive Rating:
- Dallas Thomas: 125.6
- RJ Godfrey: 120.6
- Chase Thompson: 119.1
- Nick Davidson: 115.9
- Butta Johnson: 115.5
Team MVP
RJ Godfrey: In RJ’s return to Clemson, he had his best season. Despite only being 6-foot-7 with no credible mid-range or 3-point ability, Godfrey made the absolute most of his talent. He led the team with 12.0 points per game and was second in rebounding with 5.3 per game. He was above average defensively and provided key leadership. I could have done without his 10 3-point attempts (20%), but overall he ends his Clemson career as the best player on the team and one of the most likable Clemson athletes.
The Future
It’s hard to say much about the future of the program until after they get their transfer portal haul. In the modern era, everyone is a free agent every year. We really don’t know who will be back next year, but if they can retain Ace Buckner and Zac Foster to go with promising freshman Harris Reynolds, they’ll have one of their most exciting guard groups in years.