On Wednesday night at Littlejohn Coliseum, Notre Dame men's basketball couldn't keep up with No. 13 Clemson. The Irish dropped an 83-68 result, finishing February with a 2-6 record and moving to 12-16 overall (6-11 ACC). Meanwhile, the Tigers continued their push toward a high NCAA Tournament seed, winning their 11th game in the last 12 tries and improving to 23-5 (15-2 ACC).
For Notre Dame, Wednesday's game was all about sophomore guard Markus Burton. With his game-high 30 points, the Mishawaka native became the seventh-fastest player in program history to surpass 1,000 points. He got to four digits on a bucket just before halftime and reached the 30-point plateau for the second time this season, adding four rebounds and five assists.
Outside of his two-point aberration last Wednesday against SMU, Burton has scored at least 15 points in every full game he's played.
"Right now he's driving the ball, and there's a dude guarding him and four other people standing around him, and he continues to keep scoring, to keep going, to keep playing," head coach Micah Shrewsberry said. "He's playing major minutes. He's doing his part, right? We just need more."
The Irish couldn't find much more because they were once again down two starting guards. Graduate student Matt Allocco missed his seventh consecutive game with a wrist injury, while news broke before tip-off that sophomore Braeden Shrewsberry would miss the remainder of the season with an abdominal strain. As a result, the Irish didn't have the horses to run with Clemson for 40 minutes. Junior forward Tae Davis tallied 15 points and senior guard J.R. Konieczny recorded eight, but the Irish only found 15 points outside of those two and Burton.
"We just don't have the bodies to sustain that effort that we need to keep guarding in that way [when we were successful]," Shrewsberry said. "I thought they were subbing guys, they'd bring guys in and out and they just kind of wore us down."
In a first half full of runs, the Tigers came out hot, building a 21-12 lead with still more than 12 minutes remaining until halftime. However, Clemson didn't score again for nearly seven minutes after that, as the Irish defense led a lead-taking, 10-0 run that finished with consecutive Konieczny buckets. Senior forward Ian Schieffelin reawakened the Tiger offense, scoring 10 straight points to put Clemson in a 41-31 halftime lead. The Tigers would lead by no less than six for the rest of the night, at one point going ahead by 19 down the stretch.
"We didn't do a very good job of kind of rotating to the rim on some of our pick and rolls and some of our drives or some of their drives," Shrewsberry said. "We're playing our ball-screen defense, and they get two people on the ball, and if those guards were shooting it, they're rebounding on the backside. We didn't do a great job of coming in and cracking those guys on the backside."
Though the Irish held top Clemson scorer Chase Hunter to 8 points, Schieffelin more than covered for him, spearheading a Tiger offense that finished with 23 assists. He led the team with a career-high 24 points on 9-for-11 shooting, adding nine rebounds, three assists and two steals.
"He's a hard matchup, right? You've gotta decide how you guard him," Shrewsberry described. "The way he scored and he made a couple of threes in the first half, he scored around the basket, he's just burying guys deep in the post. So you've gotta decide how you want to play and how you want to do it."
Shrewsberry had more flowers to throw the way of Schieffelin in terms of his development, as the guard double-double against Notre Dame last year and has faced the Irish head coach three times now.
"This is my third year in a row playing Clemson, right? So I've kind of seen his progression,” Shrewsberry said. "He was coming off the bench two years ago when we were here with Penn State, and now he's stepped into a major role."
"He's a guy that probably–for me, because of how you vote, they're at the top of the league–they should get multiple people on the all-league team, right? That's what you do. You vote for people that are willing. He deserves multiple votes for all-league because he's a problem."
Senior center Viktor Lakhin helped out in a big way for Clemson, totaling 18 points, five rebounds and five assists. Indiana native Jake Heidbreder chipped in nicely off the bench as well, nailing four three-pointers for a season-best of 14 points. Overall, the Tigers took great care of the basketball, turning it over just three times as the Irish did not record a single steal.
Notre Dame will finish the regular season's final road trip at Wake Forest on Saturday. Just like last year, the Demon Deacons (19-9, 11-6 ACC) are slipping as their NCAA Tournament hopes hang in the balance. Since starting the ACC schedule at 7-1, they've gone 4-5 with three inexcusable losses in their four games–the last two coming against below-.500 teams NC State and Virginia. Senior guards Hunter Sallis (18.6 points per game) and Cameron Hildreth (15.0) lead Wake Forest in scoring from the backcourt.
Notre Dame and Wake Forest will square off at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday inside the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
