No. 13 CU determined to stop slide against UW
13th-ranked Buffs host Washington to open final weekend of regular season
For some teams, a four-game losing streak, especially late in the season, could dent the confidence.
Senior Quay Miller isn’t worried about the confidence level of the Colorado women’s basketball team, however, and neither is head coach JR Payne.
“I think having an older group allows you to have pretty good perspective on things,” Payne said. “These are kids that have been through life stuff and have faced adversity before, beyond basketball. And so having that perspective I think is really important.”
On Thursday, the 13th-ranked Buffs will host Washington to kick off the final weekend of the regular season. That’s followed by a Saturday afternoon matchup against Washington State.
CU has lost four in a row, all to top-20 ranked teams by only a combined 21 points, but Payne said the key to getting out of the slump is “being able to be rational about all of it.”
The bad news about the fourgame skid is that it dropped the Buffs out of contention for the regular season Pac-12 title and damaged their chances for a firstround bye for next week’s conference tournament.
The good news is that CU’S main goals are still in play. The Buffs are talented and capable enough to finish strong this weekend, make some noise in Las Vegas next week and earn a hosting spot for the NCAA Tournament next month.
“I think that the confidence is good because we’re such a veteran team,” Miller said. “Obviously we got this far for a reason and not just off of flukes or just because we’ve won a couple games. I think that we have the
potential to bounce back from adversity like this and I think that’s all it is.
“We just have to find that game to bounce back. We’re going into every game thinking that’s our bounceback game but when we don’t pay attention to the details that we stress about, it just bites us.”
Slow starts have hurt the Buffs during this slump. CU’S three lowest-scoring halves of the year have all happened during this streak, all in the first halves against Oregon State (24 points), Utah (24) and UCLA (19). In each of those three games, the Buffs trailed by at least 10 at halftime. They had just one double-digit halftime deficit in the first 24 games.
The Buffs have had strong rallies in each of the games, but the rough starts have been tough to overcome.
“We’re just losing games by a few possessions … but they’re the possessions that we kind of gave up in the first quarter,” Miller said.
In each of the four losses, the Buffs have proven they can play with the elite teams in the conference (which are also elite teams nationally) and that, Payne said, should be a source of confidence.
“When you turn on these one-, two-, three-possession games and you see lack of execution, I don’t know how many times; even if it’s three times or 10 times it’s like, ‘Well, that was in our control,’” Payne said. “So we have to make sure that we do control those things. You can’t control all of it but the things you can, you have to.”
Being rational about the slump, Payne said, means realizing the mistakes are correctable.
“Don’t take an emotional approach to it because if we get emotional about it, then it takes away the tactical advantage that we can have if we can just stay focused on what do we need to do more effectively,” she said. “Don’t point fingers. Just do your job and to the best of your ability and stay positive. And those are the things that we can control.”
For now, all CU can control is how it plays Thursday against the Huskies, who are coming off an upset win against then-no. 9 Oregon State on Sunday.
“Right now our focus is on what’s in front of us, which is Wazzu (on Saturday) and Washington and that’s it,” Miller said. “We’re not really thinking about the Pac-12 tournament right now or the NCAA Tournament, or anything that has to do with what’s not right in front of us, which is our next two games.”