WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Virginia Tech came up just short in a rock fight with Wake Forest on Saturday afternoon, falling 81-78 in its first ACC road game.
“Hats off to the Demon Deacons, they were a little bit better than we were,” Tech head coach Mike Young said. “… They made one more play than we did.”
It came down to the final possession, and Demon Deacons (10-5, 1-1 ACC) point guard Nate Calmese capped off his terrific day with a step-back 3-pointer over the outstretched arm of Hokies (12-3, 1-1) guard Ben Hammond with 6.5 seconds remaining.
BOOM ?️@NateCalmese pic.twitter.com/UDnznX3OWA
— Wake Forest Men's Basketball (@WakeMBB) January 3, 2026
“We guarded the last possession as well as we could guard it,” Young said. “Calmese just rose up and made a shot, and that kid had a good ball game today.”
“I thought [Hammond] did a really good job of getting his chest in front of him,” Forbes said. “… They’d been getting downhill all day long, so he stepped back and made a big shot. Did I draw up a step-back three? No, I didn’t, but players have to make plays, right? And credit to him for making a great play.”
Calmese impressed, posting a season-high 25 points and seven assists on 9-for-18 shooting, including a 3-for-6 clip from behind the arc. Tech originally had him blanketed by Jaden Schutt, with Jailen Bedford, its best on-ball defender, handling the task of Juke Harris, the Deacs’ leading scorer and rebounder.
The plan changed as the game went on, however. Bedford picked up Calmese for stretches, and when Hammond was on the floor, he had that task while Bedford slid back to Harris, who had 15 points on a 7-for-8 mark from the foul line.
“He’s the best on-ball defender we’ve got,” Young said of Bedford, “to the point we moved him off of Juke onto Calmese there at different times. It seemed to me like Calmese was taking like 80 percent of their shots, so we moved JB over to him and he did a good job on him. Maybe we should’ve had JB on Calmese on that last one. It maybe was there and we got switched up with a guard-on-guard ball screen.”
Wake Forest made the last push in a game of runs, one that saw Virginia Tech charge back with a 12-0 burst in the second half to take its first lead of the day, 62-58, with 7:21 remaining.
The Deacs knotted things up through two Calmese free throws and took the lead on a transition dunk by Tre’Von Spillers. The Hokies didn’t go away, though, as Amani Hansberry swung the lead back in their direction with a 3-pointer from the top of the key when Wake had a poor defensive rotation. It was 74-73 Tech with 1:24 remaining.
Then came the turning point: Spillers’ three-point play on the other end when Hansberry picked up his fifth personal foul, ending his day. A manly rebound from Christian Gurdak tied things back up for the Hokies at 76 with 49 seconds left, but after Wake Forest grabbed two offensive rebounds — including one that went out of bounds off the fingertips of Bedford — Calmese hit the game-winner.
“Really just locking in on defense,” Bedford said of what Tech needed down the stretch. “That’s the main key. Rebounding, for sure, and just those gritty 50-50 plays.”
It was a disappointing ending for the Hokies, who turned things around in the second half after a disastrous start. They had a turnover-plagued first half, matching their season-high 13 in the game’s first 12 minutes and finishing with 19 on the day. The Demon Deacons frustrated them early.
“Holy cow, first four minutes and then 14 in the first half,” Young said. “They were more aggressive.”
Tech fell into a quick 12-2 hole before the first media timeout when three consecutive turnovers from Neoklis Avdalas led to easy transition baskets for Wake. It blitzed the Hokies’ ball screens with Avdalas and pressured their big man rolling to the middle of the lane, taking away the favored passing option.
“I thought we did a really good job of mixing up our ball-screen coverages on them,” Forbes said. “I thought we confused them early. We used kind of three different looks. They got us a few times, they figured out a couple things and then we changed something else. … To turn them over 19 times tells me that we had them off balance for a lot of that, and that’s hard to do on a Mike Young-coached team. …
“We were guarding the ball screen differently based on their personnel. We were guarding [Avdalas] a little bit different than the rest of them. And I thought, in the words of my good friend Chris Jans, the head coach at Mississippi State, we were very ‘handsy,’ and we got our hands on a lot of balls, a lot of deflections.”
It took Avdalas some time to find his footing, but he had seven turnovers to go with his eight points and seven assists.
“He was visibly frustrated, and as a young person, you better come on, you better grow up,” Young said of Avdalas. “It’s a big-boy game. It’s the Atlantic Coast Conference, and when something doesn’t go your way, you can’t drop your dauber and sulk. You’ve got to bring it, and I thought he did a better job of that in the second half, made some good plays for us.”
Tech’s two frontcourt pieces also dealt with foul trouble. Hansberry (19 points, 10 rebounds) and Gurdak (six points, six rebounds) each picked up three personals by the seven-minute mark of the first half, which included a technical on Hansberry that made Young shake his head.
Hansberry was great when on the floor and had 14 points in the second half, though he played just 27 minutes. “We have a hard time without him,” Young said, and that was amplified with Tobi Lawal, Tyler Johnson and Antonio Dorn sidelined for the second consecutive contest with injuries.
“The best thing that happened to us is that he got in foul trouble in the first half,” Forbes said of Hansberry. “That was our best defense on him, for him to sit down. When he was in the game, he was extremely effective.”
Young added that Lawal, a double-double machine who has been out since Nov. 26 vs. Colorado State with a lower-body injury, has “a shot” to play on Wednesday vs. Stanford.
“That remains to be seen,” Young said, “and that’s barring any unforeseen setbacks between now and then. That is not a guarantee.”
Still, it was a four-point game at intermission, 36-32, after Hammond, Bedford and Schutt kept the Hokies alive with four 3-pointers over five minutes. Out of necessity, they also played 6-foot-7 freshman Sin’Cere Jones (6-7) at center during that stretch, flanked by the aforementioned trio of 3-point shooters and Avdalas.
Tech improved in the second half behind 60 percent shooting (15-for-25) and an 11-for-14 clip (79%) from the foul line. The two sides traded blows like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, but it wasn’t until the 12-0 run — sparked by Bedford, who had a trey and a jumper, and a Hansberry three — that the Hokies pulled in front.
Bedford snapped out of his December funk — he was 9-for-28 (32%) from the field, 3-for-14 (21%) from the outside and averaged 4.6 points over five games last month — and dropped 25 points on 9-for-18 shooting, highlighted by a 5-for-11 mark from three.
“Just found my groove,” Bedford said. “Just trying to stay as consistent as possible, taking easy shots that my teammates allow me to take.”
Where the Hokies struggled in the waning moments was on the glass. After limiting the Demon Deacons to five offensive rebounds and three second-chance points in the first half, Wake Forest was more physical and pushed Virginia Tech around to the tune of eight offensive boards and 16 second-chance points in the second.
That showed up in the middle of the half, when Cooper Schwieger and Mekhi Mason made back-to-back triples off of offensive boards, and was pivotal late on Spillers’ clutch tip-in off a miss from Mason, which gave the Deacs a lead and fouled out Hansberry.
The Hokies pushed No. 21 Virginia around on the inside in their triple-overtime victory on Wednesday, but Wake matched their physicality — and then some — in critical moments on Saturday.
“I knew it’d be a physical game,” Forbes said. “I told my team this was a true identity game where you have to play to your identity and you have no chance to win, and you’re going to have to play through physicality, and I thought we did that for the most part. I thought us turning them over was a huge part of the game.”
Tech is back at home on Wednesday against Stanford, who is fresh off a win over No. 16 Louisville. Cal visits Cassell Coliseum on Saturday, too, before the Hokies travel to SMU the following week.
Box Score: Wake Forest 81, Virginia Tech 78