Tourney hopes fading for Buffaloes
Opportunity lost for statement in loss to Utah
SALT LAKE CITY >> The Colorado men’s basketball team will not officially be eliminated from anything until the clock finally runs out on the 2022-23 season.
Still, the odds of the Buffaloes conjuring some sort of late-season run become longer with each passing day.
CU (14-12, 6-9 Pac-12) squandered one of its final opportunities to make a postseason statement on Saturday night, falling behind early and hardly mustering a fight the rest of the way in a 73-62 defeat at Utah.
The Utes led by double-digits for the bulk of the second half and outrebounded CU by 12, the second-largest rebounding deficit of the season for the Buffs. With five games remaining in the regular season, the Buffs could always turn heads. Yet a team that has won more than two consecutive games only once this season — winning five in a row during a December run comprised mostly of mid-major foes, four of which were at home — has displayed little of the consistency or toughness required to make a late-season push.
Saturday’s defeat dropped the Buffs to 1-8 in true road games, and CU will hit the road for two games again this week beginning Thursday at Arizona State (6 p.m. MT, Pac-12 Network) and continuing on Saturday at nationallyranked Arizona. The Buffs will finish the regular season with three games at home, but they all will be against teams either vying for the conference championship or a spot in the 68-team NCAA Tournament field (USC, UCLA, Utah).
“This program has set standards in the past,” CU head coach Tad Boyle said. “The players have set those standards. The coaching staff, we haven’t asked previous players or previous teams to do anything different than we’re asking this team to do. But this team doesn’t do it consistently. They just don’t.
“That’s where I have to look internally in myself. I have to look at our coaching staff. I have to look at the players that are in uniform. We’ve got five games left in this season, and then the Pac-12 tournament. We’ve just got to try go get better and try to exude toughness on a regular basis. We just don’t do it, and I don’t know why. And it’s my job to find out why. I don’t have an answer.
I don’t know if our players have answers. But I’m going to ask.”
Only two CU teams under Boyle have failed to reach either the NCAA Tournament or the NIT — the 2014-15 team, which accepted a bid to the third-tier CBI postseason tournament, and the 2017-18 squad, which featured a freshman class led by Mckinley Wright IV and Tyler Bey that soon would achieve bigger things.
The Buffs are unlikely to accept a Cbi-type bid again, and with the arrival of highly-touted recruit Cody Williams next season, the future arguably is even brighter than when the Buffs ended the 2017-18 campaign. But that won’t quell the sting of a team likely to be sent home whenever its run ends at the Pac12 tournament in Las Vegas next month.
“We all love playing together. We’re fighting,” CU guard Julian Hammond III said. “We just look to the next game. Because at the end of the day, regardless of where we end up in the standings, we’re all playing at the same tournament at the end of the year and we know we can beat any team in the league.”