BC Can’t Buy a Basket in Blowout Loss at Wake Forest
Andy Backstrom (@andybackstrom)
Publisher
Wake Forest is 50th nationally in adjusted tempo, according to KenPom. The Demon Deacons, who now rank 30th in Division I in points per game (79.2), can light up the scoreboard.
They have the ACC Player of the Year favorite in Alondes Williams—who leads the conference in scoring average and assists—and they have two other transfers who also average 12 or more points.
Steve Forbes has rebuilt Wake Forest despite ranking 277th in the country in KenPom’s minutes continuity (33.4%) metric. It’s a high-octane offense that Boston College men’s basketball was going to have to contain Monday night in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The Eagles didn’t. More like they couldn’t because they shot 25.4% from the floor—their worst single-game shooting percentage against an ACC opponent all-time—and Wake Forest coasted to its fourth straight win, an 87-57 victory.
“They’ve proven they can score, so when you have an opportunity to score, you have to keep it even,” first-year BC head coach Earl Grant said. “But when we weren’t scoring, I thought it affected our defense, and we didn’t bring the energy and intensity we needed to stop them.”
Grant added that he didn’t think the Eagles (8-10, 3-5 ACC) brought the “juice” necessary to compete with the Demon Deacons (17-4, 7-3), who came into the night receiving votes in the latest AP Poll. At first, however, neither team was sound offensively.
The game was tied, 5-5, at the first media timeout. BC started 2-of-9, and Wake Forest wasn’t much better. The Demon Deacons were 2-of-7 from the floor with three quick turnovers.
BC had chances—several, in fact—at the rim. The Eagles finished 8-of-27 on layups and missed their lone dunk attempt. Similar to their loss at Louisville last week, they couldn’t finish in the lane.
As the Eagles were weathering dry spells, Wake Forest created separation with runs, the first of which was a 10-0 spurt that featured four points from Daivien Williamson. The senior guard registered all 12 of his points in the first half.
Wake Forest continued to widen the gap during a three-plus-minute Eagles drought in the back half of the period. Makai Ashton-Langford resumed BC’s scoring with an off-balanced 3-pointer. But Williamson answered on the other end with a triple of his own to make it 33-16, Demon Deacons.
Everything looked harder than it had to be for the Eagles. Even their final play of the half, which actually resulted in a Jaeden Zackery 3-pointer before the buzzer, included an errant pass out of a double team.
TJ Bickerstaff did a nice job of keeping Wake Forest forward Jake LaRavia in check in the first half. LaRavia had just two points on 0-of-4 shooting after erupting for a career-high 31 in the Demon Deacons’ thrashing of North Carolina Saturday. In the second period, though, the Indiana State transfer set the tone.
He threw down a perfect alley-oop pass from Williams—lofted from the Wake Forest logo—and then, a few minutes later, dunked again on the break, this time off a Zackery turnover.
With 11:36 remaining, BC’s Brevin Galloway, DeMarr Langford Jr. and James Karnik had a combined five points. And the Demon Deacons were hot off another 7-0 run. Williams charged Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum with a thunderous dunk, and Khadim Sy knocked down a 3-pointer.
Wake Forest was baiting the Eagles into outside shots, and they couldn’t capitalize. BC was 6-of-25 (24%) from deep. Galloway, the Eagles’ most prominent 3-point shooter, is now 0-of-12 from long range since his Clemson heroics.
With all of BC’s misses, the Demon Deacons were able to push the ball in transition. They finished with 21 fastbreak points. And, often, the high-octane offense led to trips to the charity stripe, where Wake Forest was 21-of-23.
As the Demon Deacons’ lead stretched to 20 and then 30, BC’s field goal percentage continued to drop. Things went from bad to worse for the Eagles when Ashton-Langford, their leading scorer, hit the floor hard after diving for a loose ball. He didn’t return to the game.
Grant said postgame that he didn’t have details from the team’s medical staff but that Ashton-Langford did come back out of the locker room. Grant didn’t insert him out of caution and because the score was so lopsided. Instead, he used the final minutes as a chance to get some younger players involved.
Wake Forest did the same thing and still rounded out the night with a 30-point victory. It was a tough loss for a BC squad to stomach, especially after the Eagles played some of their best basketball of the season two days prior in a win over Virginia Tech.
“We still got a team that’s trying to figure out how to win,” Grant said. “I thought that was mental. We played 36 hours ago—we played great, we played hard. And you gotta get back up and do it again.”
