The Louisville Cardinals hosted the Clemson Tigers at the Yum! Center on Tuesday night for an ACC showdown.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A big game for the Cardinals happened on Tuesday night. Louisville (11-5, 4-1 ACC) had the opportunity to beat Clemson (12-4, 4-1) and tie for second place in the ACC. Clemson came into the Yum! Center without a conference loss.
The game in totality was very competitive. Neither the Cards nor the Tigers could pull away from each other, the Tigers would lead by six points multiple times in the first half but never pulled away. Louisville would go on a run before the end of the first half and lead the Tigers by seven heading into halftime.
The Cards would hold on to this lead throughout the game, although Clemson did make it a two-point game with just over ten minutes remaining in the game. After the game, Clemson head coach, Brad Brownell mentioned how “the crowd got to our guys for some reason” noting how loud the Yum! Center was rocking on Tuesday night.
If you haven’t found out by now, J’Vonne Hadley had a spectacular game. He scored a game-high and career-high thirty-two points and also tacked on ten rebounds. Hadley and the rest of the team would lead Louisville to a 74-64 victory over the Tigers, which will be a very important win not only for ACC rankings but for their NCAA Tournament chances as well.
As it stands today, College Basketball insider and bracketologist, Joe Lunardi has the Cards listed as one of the teams who will get a “first-round bye”. I put those in quotation marks because it’s just to get into the tournament without playing the play-in game.
With the win, the Cardinals move up to 37th in the Kenpom rankings. However, they moved down the NET rankings one rank (40th) because North Carolina beat a good SMU team.
Not too many notables this game due to the fact that our game MVP, J’Vonne Hadley went absolutely nuclear. We do however have to give a shoutout to our guy James Scott for recording another double-double.
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