[Cactus Jack]

Otega Oweh played great. Amari Williams played well but you'd like to see Clemson's big have less than 20 rebounds. Butler and Carr were in foul trouble for much of the game and had their moments, but were a wash overall. Robinson played well enough given what we had to ask of him, but could have been more selective. Not the best showing for Kriisa, Almonor, and Garrison.

Physical road game against an experienced team who was up for us (see the court storming). Littlejohn wasn't the most intimidating arena-- was basically an AAC sized venue.

Clemson was better than I thought. They rotate well and play within their structure and rules. Very physical on the glass and made Kentucky commit instead of looking to leak out over them. Most of all thought, I think they did a really good job dictating the pace. Wouldn't say that they looked to run by any means, but thought they did a really good job of "running" and pushing out breaks when it made sense for them to do so. Worry that they'll be handfuls of SEC games where we aren't shooting the best and just have to eat some losses.

Whether it was trying to push out the point and/or get out over our initial screen, blowing up dribble hand-offs, taking their chances with us finishing at the rim when they were able to run us off the line (which happened more than we'd have liked), Clemson's game plan was to take away at least one thing we did well to make us more one dimensional and living with the results of how they could defend everything else from there. Didn't mention Brea above, but you could tell that they were trying to take him out of the game and live with whatever came with it (Butler hit a big three where he was basically freed by all the attention on Brea, but that isn't exactly the kind of looks that were ideal for us).

At the end of the day, Kentucky is a top-20 level team but they were too high at #4 and I'd rather watch what we just saw (12 turnovers, not being lost on simple expectations and execution late) versus what we'd been getting from Cal. Have been in a bit of a lull the past few games, so hopefully we are up for and hot against Gonzaga.