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Coaches often like to create "controlled scrimmages" in which they present their players with various forms of duress to see how they respond.
Think of last night as one of those settings. Except the coaches didn't orchestrate it, and it wasn't a scrimmage.
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For a team that hadn't played in forever, and one with a bunch of new parts, you couldn't script a better way to open the season than by having Aamir Simms play fewer than eight minutes.
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Yeah, for Simms himself it was probably frustrating as heck to sit almost the entire first half after drawing his second foul just 1:24 into the season.
For a first-team All-ACC star, four points on 1-of-5 shooting with one rebound and two turnovers in 7:34 of play isn't exactly how you draw it up.
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But collectively, this couldn't have been drawn up much better as Brad Brownell began his 11th season at Clemson with a convincing 53-42 win over Mississippi State.
No, it wasn't an artistic masterpiece if your definition of cosmetics is rooted in shooting.
Clemson took 25 shots from 3 and missed 20 of them. That's not good.
But the fact that the Tigers were in control almost throughout was a testament to physical and mental toughness displayed mostly on the defensive end.
The Bulldogs shot 30 percent and committed 19 turnovers while handing out just six assists. Clemson scored 22 points off those turnovers and was a nuisance from beginning to end.
The shooting will come. When you open the season with this kind of defense, and do it mostly without your best player -- yeah, the head coach can work with that.
"This was our first game and we had no exhibitions, no scrimmages," Brownell said. "We looked like it a few times with some nervous shooting and energy. We went to the wrong spot a few times on some things we practiced a lot.
"But I thought we got an A-plus in effort, togetherness and fight. That's really good, and that's what you want to see out of your team."
You could even sense the advantage in energy beyond the actual court as Clemson's bench and support staff seemed to be more enthusiastic and encouraging than its counterparts on the other end of a gym that didn't have fans.
And the Tigers' reserves brought tangible contributions as well, supplying 26 points.
There have been some points in recent years when things might've felt stale, but that's certainly not the aura right now. Everyone knew P.J. Hall was talented, but he looked right at home in his first college game with a natural scoring ability. He scored 10 crafty points on 5-of-6 shooting and pulled down seven rebounds in 23 minutes.
"His ability to finish the plays today, that was really high-level," Brownell said. "That’s what separates high-level players. There’s a lot of guys that can do some different things, score a couple buckets, get some rebounds. But the ability to finish different kinds of shots and be a shot-maker, those are the guys that become really, really good, high-level players."
As forecast, the presence of Al-Amir Dawes and Nick Honor is going to make life hard on opposing point guards.
Mississippi State trotted out a freshman point guard, so this was an advantage situation for Clemson going in. The two regularly disrupted the Bulldogs' offense, and Brownell sees this continuing through the season.
"As long as we’re healthy we’ll try to do that," Brownell said. "We're trying to wear teams down a little bit, make them a little uncomfortable and play more guys. I want our guys to play hard. I want to extend. I want to pressure. We haven’t been able to do that the last several years because we just haven’t been as healthy and haven’t had the kind of depth that you need, or the personnel to fit it. This year we kind of do, so I think that’s something you’ll see a lot with our team this year."
Honor is also going to be a threat on the offensive end. His shooting was off early, but the staff told him to keep firing. Honor finished with eight points in 15:46 on the floor.
Honor and Daws were 6-of-18 shooting, but Brownell thinks that's an aberration.
"Nick hadn't played in two years," Brownell said. "I thought he did some really good things tonight. We encourage him to shoot as much as he can. He took some good shots. Maybe he didn't have good rhythm on a couple of them.
"He and Al did a great job of pressuring them, fighting, being the head of the snake of our defense."
Now they welcome back the head of the team (Simms) for tonight's matchup against Purdue.
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