“This is the first time I’ve had a team where everybody could shoot the ball. It’s been pretty great,” said Colorado junior forward Wesley Gordon. “It’s really great, teams are now scared to mess up because they know we’re going to punish them if they do.”
It has been pretty great for Colorado, the Buffaloes are playing a beautiful brand of basketball which has everybody making the extra pass and trusting their teammates to make the open look, and making it they are. The Buffs currently rank 29th in the country in points per game at 84.8 and 14th in the country in three-point percentage at 42 percent.
“This team, everybody can shoot it,” said senior forward Josh Scott. “When I see somebody open I think that it’s going in, we have some people that can really stroke it.”
Colorado currently has six players in their rotation shooting over 35 percent from distance (minimum 10 attempts) four of which are shooting over 40 percent.
Even Wesley Gordon is heating up from outside, shooting 2-of-3 in the last two games from deep and making another in which his foot was on the line. That’s opening things up even more for the rest of the team, as just about anybody will tell you.
“When I started shooting, even if I would miss the coaches would keep telling me that it was a good shot and to keep shooting it,” Gordon said of why he’s letting it fly. “In my mind, I didn’t really get down on myself about missed shots, which allowed me to keep my aggression. It opens up a lot of opportunities for other guys because now defenses have to guard me out there. ”
“I think he kind of looked at this season as, ‘I need to be aggressive, I don’t want to have another year like last year,’,” Scott said of Gordon. “As a team, we need him to be aggressive, we need him taking nine shots whether he makes them or misses them. He needs to be aggressive. When he’s aggressive it puts a whole lot of pressure on the other team.”
“The thing about Wes he’s not crazy aggressive, he’s not taking bad shots,” added in Tad Boyle. “He’s a very team-oriented guy, he’s a very good passer, very willing passer but I think he’s figured out that the more aggressive he is the more it opens things up for everybody else.”
Oh, and Scott is consistently knocking down his mid-range jumper.
“If teams are going to sag off of me, I said this coming into the year, I’m going to shoot it,” he said. “I’ve been working on my shot, I have confidence in it and it’s part of my game now.”
So you have one of the best low-post scorers in the country, another guy capable of scoring on the low post efficiently, both of those guys can score from outside and you have a plethora of guys cashing out from downtown. How do you guard that? Tad Boyle wonders the same thing.
“Josh, against BYU, was making jump shots and if he’s doing that and scoring on the block it’s like, ‘how do you guard us?’,” Boyle wondered with a smile. “If Wesley is making jump shots, we do a lot of high-low action, if he’s hitting that 15 to 17-foot shot, they can’t key on Josh, they have to come out and guard him so that opens it up inside for Josh. It’s critical that we have that inside-out ability, to keep them honest on the perimeter.”
How do you guard them? It’s a question that many coaches will be asking themselves as they prepare for the Buffaloes and if things continue to go the way they are right now, they might not find many answers.
