Brad Brownell says this is the quietest team he's ever coached, and of late one of his prime objectives has been generating more vocal leadership among his players.
He made a candid point after Saturday's win over UVA when he said after a while, when you're not winning regularly, players tend to tune out the words of their coaches. And that's the time when the leadership of the team needs to emerge and make its presence felt, refusing to buckle under adverse circumstances.
It's kind of like the recent Chick-fil-A Bowl. What if the veteran leadership on the team -- Tajh Boyd, Dalton Freeman, Tig Willard, others -- didn't possess the ironclad determination to win, the utter defiance in the face of that gut punch early in the game? You need guys to pull others out of the abyss, and if the leaders don't do it in that game LSU probably wins by 17.
Cultivating leadership on the basketball team is much easier talked about than carried out. You have two seniors, one who's exceptionally quiet (Devin Booker) and one who's kind of an emotional rollercoaster (Milton Jennings). You have zero juniors. And your point guard, the guy who's generally the best fit to impart leadership in basketball, is an exceptionally quiet sophomore (Rod Hall).
So it hasn't been easy. Brownell was saying yesterday that the staff has noticed the team tends to execute better, offensively and defensively, when it's in front of its own bench. When the team is on the other end of the floor, 70-80 feet seems like a few miles sometimes because the guys on the floor have not been good at generating their own confidence. That's not good.
"Guys have to rally themselves," Brownell said.
Adonis Filer is an exception, possessing the vocal presence and fearless nature Brownell wants. But he's not yet up to speed with all the nuances of running an offense and making the right decisions. That'll come with time, though.
Brownell had the luxury of Demontez Stitt and Jerai Grant in his first year at Clemson, and those were two guys (particularly Stitt) who would grab games by the throat and put the rest of the team on their backs. That intangible diminished last year with the more reserved Andre Young, Tanner Smith and Bryan Narcisse as the figureheads, but it's taken a big dip this year.
Jennings, who had 21 and 11 in Saturday's critical victory, has been painting that game as his epiphany. He says he has to talk more, lead more and take more than seven shots a game. More like 13 or 14. Brownell says Jennings needs to score 15 points a game, and he believes the two seniors must combine for 30 to 35 points a game for Clemson to be successful. They're combining to average 22, so there's a ways to go on that front.
Brownell makes a great point when he says that getting that extra 8-10 points means making the extra effort that can ripple through the rest of the team. It's not easy to crash the boards and fight for rebounds, to go strong to the rim and draw a foul that puts you at the line, to run the floor and get a bucket or put-back in transition. But those are the things that generate not just numbers, but the psychological boost this team needs.
This is not do-or-die time, because at 1-2 in the ACC the Tigers aren't in terrible shape given they have a fairly friendly schedule (Duke once, Maryland once). But it's an interesting juncture for this team, because the big question (to me, at least) is whether they can sustain the urgency and leadership we saw for 40 minutes the other day.
LW
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