• The Cardinals’ win was fueled by a balanced offense with four players scoring in double digits.
• Despite a slow start, Louisville managed to secure a halftime lead by matching Clemson’s physicality and dominating in the paint.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Louisville basketball is one win from its first ACC Tournament championship after finishing dead last in the conference the past two seasons.

Pat Kelsey‘s No. 2-seeded Cardinals advanced to Saturday’s title game (8:30 p.m., ESPN), where they will face No. 1 Duke, by notching a Quad 1 victory over No. 3 Clemson, 76-73, on Friday at the Spectrum Center. 

With the win, Kelsey broke a U of L record that has stood since 1972: most victories by a first-year coach, dethroning the late Hall of Famer Denny Crum with his 27th.

And that’s not all; per statistician Kelly Dickey on X, formerly Twitter, the Cards’ 19-win improvement from the 2023-24 season is now tied for the largest one-year turnaround in Division I history when Iowa State’s +20 jump from the 2020-21 campaign, which was shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is taken out of the equation. 

Here are three takeaways from the victory: 

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Louisville wins with balance offensively

After Clemson eked out a 57-54 win over No. 6 SMU on Thursday, a reporter reminded coach Brad Brownell of J’Vonne Hadley dropping a career-high 32 points on his team during a 10-point loss to Louisville on Jan. 7 at the KFC Yum! Center. Did he plan to emphasize slowing down the fifth-year Colorado transfer this time around? 

“I don’t know that you can just focus on one player; that’s why Louisville is really good,” Brownell said. “They’ve got several guys that can have big nights. 

“(Hadley) wasn’t even the all-conference guy. He’s a great player, but we’ve got to guard as a team (and) develop a plan to try to make it hard for them.”

Brownell was spot-on in his assessment but didn’t have an answer for slowing down Louisville’s balanced attack; although there was some discrepancy in shot volume.

Terrence Edwards Jr. led the Cards with 21 points; he was one of their four double-digit scorers. The others were Hadley with 20, Chucky Hepburn with 12 and Noah Waterman with 10.

Edwards and Hepburn accounted for 30 of the Cards’ 55 shot attempts, converting 10 of them. No one else took more than Hadley’s nine.

Edwards was the first-half spark plug, scoring 13 on 5-for-12 shooting during the opening 20 minutes, and went 6 for 6 at the free-throw line in the second half. Hadley, as was the case when these teams met two months ago, was the closer — going for a team-high 15 after the break.

The Cards improved defensively — until the end

Per KenPom.com, Louisville’s defensive efficiency of 113 points allowed per 100 possessions Thursday in its come-from-behind, last-second win over No. 7 Stanford was its worst showing on that end since a Dec. 14 loss to archrival Kentucky at Rupp Arena (127.4) — and only the 10th time all season the Cards had passed the 110 mark. 

In its first game against a ranked opponent since coming up short against the Wildcats, Kelsey’s team needed to be much, much better than that. Clemson entered Friday with an adjusted offensive efficiency of 119 points per 100 possessions on KenPom; which ranked 21st in DI. 

U of L held the Tigers to 0.933 points per possession during the first half, then gave up 1.154 during the second for an average of 1.028 — better than Stanford’s 1.159 on Thursday — on 39% shooting (31.3% from 3-point range) and converted nine turnovers into 11 points. 

Clemson’s leading scorer, first-team All-ACC selection Chase Hunter, was held to four points on 2-for-6 shooting during the first half. He finished with a game-high 23 but needed a whopping 20 shot attempts to get there.

With Hunter leading the way, and Louisville struggling against the full-court press late, the Tigers clawed their way back from what was at its largest a 15-point Cards lead with 3:50 remaining in regulation to make this a one-possession game with 22 seconds on the clock. But, when U of L needed a stop, Aboubacar Traore blocked a layup attempt from Hunter that would have knotted the score at 75.

Hunter had a chance to send the game to overtime at the buzzer, but his last-ditch 3 didn’t fall.

Lesson learned: start stronger 

After Louisville pulled off its largest comeback of the season Thursday, erasing a 15-point deficit with 14:32 remaining in regulation and walking away with a 75-73 win thanks to Hepburn’s buzzer-beating jumper from the left elbow as time expired, Edwards told reporters the Cards couldn’t afford another slow start in the semifinals.

“It shouldn’t take for us to be down 15 to come out and play like that,” the fifth-year Atlanta native said. “That’s how we play from the jump.”

Things didn’t exactly go to plan when the ball was tipped Friday. U of L committed three turnovers before the first media timeout and trailed for 12:29 of the opening 20 minutes. And yet, it held a 33-28 halftime edge. 

How? Louisville matched Clemson’s physicality on a night when it took nearly 13 minutes to get a 3 to fall and attempted only two free throws before the break. 

Twenty of the Cards’ first-half points came in the paint. Hadley and Traore punched above their weight class against Viktor Lakhin and Ian Schieffelin on the glass; combining for 11 of the team’s 19 rebounds during the period while Waterman and James Scott sat for eight and 10 minutes, respectively, with two fouls apiece. And Hepburn wreaked the type of havoc one would expect from the ACC’s Defensive Player of the Year, entering the locker room with five steals.

Reach Louisville men’s basketball reporter Brooks Holton at [email protected] and follow him on X at @brooksHolton.