(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Tuesday was the first day of the ACC Tournament from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The tournament started with a day session that featured four of the lower seeded teams in the conference fighting to continue their fine stays in New York.

While it would seem that the first day of the tournament featured nothing worth talking about, there were some stories that came out the two games. But first, here are final scores for the Day 1 Afternoon Session games.

Clemson 75, NC State 61

Wake Forest 92, Boston College 78

Mark Gottfried’s Last Game As NC State Coach

On Feb. 16, NC State announced that Mark Gottfried would be fired as head basketball coach. It was also announced that Gottfried would stay on through the end of the season, something that is not often seen when a coach is fired. The problem is that at many instances during his last few weeks at the helm of NC State, it seemed that the players had checked out and that Gottfried had lost his players. During the opening game of the ACC Tournament, a player just walked away from Gottfried as he was talking to him while walking into the locker room at halftime.

The Gottfried-led Wolfpack went down 75-61 to Clemson in the first round of the ACC Tourney which ended Gottfried tenure with the team. After a couple of successful seasons, expectations got the best of a coach who had a good track record with two other teams in his career. NC State will never compete for a national championship but after two NCAA Tournament appearances, Wolfpack fans administrators believed that they could. Gottfried would have been better served to just take the rest of the season off and take vacation with his family, using NC State’s money.

Speaking of the opening game of the ACC Tournament…

Clemson May Be A Scary Matchup In Brooklyn

Yes, Clemson took on a team whose coach was on his way out the door but in Clemson’s 14-point win over NC State, I saw a team that could make a run in New York. 15 turnovers forced, six steals and holding their opponent to just 38 percent shooting from the field is what a team needs to do to make some noise in a conference tournament.

Clemson now moves on to play Duke in the second round of the ACC Tournament. In their only meeting this season, Clemson lost a two-point heart-breaker to the Blue Devils in February. With Duke, it all depends on what Duke team will show up in Brooklyn. Do we get the focused, top ten Duke team that beats lesser opponents? Or do we get a helter-skelter Duke team who can’t shoot, with Grayson Allen tripping players? If Duke isn’t careful, Clemson walk away with an upset win on Wednesday.

The ACC Taking Over Brooklyn

Last year the Atlantic 10 took over Brooklyn and this year, the Barclays Center pulled a coup in getting the ACC into their building. Always assumed to be a Big East city, the ACC is attempting to take some of the spotlight away from the Big East Tournament, taking place this week at Madison Square Garden.

It is an interesting experiment, one that some are still scratching their heads over as most of the fan bases for the ACC are in Mid-Atlantic/Southern states. My colleague Joshua Sampson will be taking a deeper look at this move for the ACC this week but it will be intriguing to see attendance figures and interest in this tournament in New York, aside from games featuring Syracuse, Duke or North Carolina.

Stay with Double G Sports this week as we will be covering the ACC Tournament until a champion is crowned on Saturday night in Brooklyn.