CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Louisville basketball is one win from its first ACC Tournament championship after finishing dead last in the conference the past two seasons.
Pat Kelsey’s No. 2-seeded Cardinals advanced to Saturday’s title game (8:30 p.m., ESPN), where they will face No. 1 Duke, by notching a Quad 1 victory over No. 3 Clemson, 76-73, on Friday at the Spectrum Center.
With the win, Kelsey broke a U of L record that has stood since 1972: most victories by a first-year coach, dethroning the late Hall of Famer Denny Crum.
And that’s not all; per statistician Kelly Dickey on X, formerly Twitter, the Cards’ 19-win improvement from the 2023-24 season is now tied for the largest one-year turnaround in Division I history when Iowa State’s +20 jump from the 2020-21 campaign, which was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is taken out of the equation.
Here are three takeaways from the victory:
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Louisville wins with balance offensively
After Clemson eked out a 57-54 win over No. 6 SMU on Thursday, a reporter reminded coach Brad Brownell of J’Vonne Hadley dropping a career-high 32 points on his team during a 10-point loss to Louisville on Jan. 7 at the KFC Yum! Center. Did he plan to emphasize slowing down the fifth-year Colorado transfer this time around?
“I don’t know that you can just focus on one player; that’s why Louisville is really good,” Brownell said. “They’ve got several guys that can have big nights.
“(Hadley) wasn’t even the all-conference guy. He’s a great player, but we’ve got to guard as a team (and) develop a plan to try to make it hard for them.”
Brownell was spot on in his evaluation but didn’t have an answer for slowing down Louisville’s balanced attack.
Terrence Edwards Jr. led the Cards with 21 points; he was one of four double-digit scorers. Following him: Hadley with 20, Chucky Hepburn with 12 and Noah Waterman with 10. Edwards and Hepburn accounted for 30 of the Cards’ 55 shot attempts. No one else took more than Hadley’s nine.
Edwards was the first-half spark plug, scoring 13 on 5-for-12 shooting during the opening 20 minutes. Hadley, as was the case when these teams met two months ago, was the closer — going for a team-high 15 after the break.
The Cards bounced back defensively — until the end
Per KenPom.com, Louisville’s defensive efficiency of 113 points allowed per 100 possessions Thursday against Stanford was its worst showing on that end since a Dec. 14 loss to archrival Kentucky at Rupp Arena (127.4) — and only the 10th time all season the Cards had passed the 110 mark.
In its first game against a ranked opponent since coming up short against the Wildcats, Kelsey’s team needed to be much, much better than that. Clemson entered Friday with an adjusted offensive efficiency of 119 points per 100 possessions on KenPom; which ranked 21st in DI.
U of L held the Tigers to 1.028 points per possession Friday on 39% shooting (31.3% from beyond the arc) and converted nine turnovers into 11 points.
Clemson’s leading scorer, first-team All-ACC selection Chase Hunter, was held to four points on 2-for-6 shooting during the first half. He finished with a game-high 23 but needed a whopping 20 shot attempts to get there.
All this said, the Tigers clawed their way back from what was at its largest a 15-point Cards lead with 3:50 remaining in regulation to make this a one-possession game during the final moments. That can’t happen Saturday against the Blue Devils.
Lesson learned: start stronger
After Louisville pulled off its largest comeback of the season Thursday vs. No. 7 Stanford, erasing a 15-point deficit with 14:32 remaining in regulation and walking away with a 75-73 win thanks to Hepburn’s buzzer-beating jumper from the left elbow as time expired, Edwards told reporters the Cards couldn’t afford another slow start in the semifinals.
“It shouldn’t take for us to be down 15 to come out and play like that,” the fifth-year Atlanta native said. “That’s how we play from the jump.”
Things did exactly go to plan when the ball was tipped Friday. U of L committed three turnovers before the first media timeout and trailed for 12:29 of the opening 20 minutes. And yet, it held a 33-28 halftime edge.
How? Louisville matched Clemson’s physicality on a night when it took nearly 13 minutes to get a 3 to fall and attempted only two free throws before the break.
Twenty of the Cards’ first-half points came in the paint. Hadley and Aboubacar Traore punched above their weight class against Lakhin and Schieffelin on the glass; combining for 11 of the team’s 19 rebounds while Waterman and Scott sat for eight and 10 minutes, respectively, with two fouls apiece. And Hepburn wreaked the type of havoc one would expect from the ACC’s Defensive Player of the Year, finishing the period with five steals.
Reach Louisville men’s basketball reporter Brooks Holton at [email protected] and follow him on X at @brooksHolton.
