BOULDER — The path to a bye in the Pac-12 tournament is as clear as it’s ever been: win the home games, split the road games.
Up until Saturday, Colorado had done exactly that.
The Buffs were sitting pretty at third place in the Pac-12 with a sparkling 5-0 home record and a 2-3 road record that was as close to .500 as possible. The difference between 2-3 and 3-2 was a disappointing loss to Washington, which was the Buffs’ only bad loss all year.
On Saturday, Colorado found to add an even worse loss to the resume, by giving up a 31-9 run in the game’s final 8:46 and missing a 3-pointer at the buzzer that would have sent the game to overtime.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been more disappointed in a loss in my career,” head coach Tad Boyle said after the game. “I mean, to have a game in hand like that and not finish it — and it’s not like we didn’t talk about the way that they could get back in the game.”
The talks weren’t enough, though.
“At some point you gotta stop talking about things and you gotta do them,” Boyle said.
One bad loss can be tossed out as an outlier, especially when the team is still firmly in the championship race. A second loss — one that leaves the 2.5 games back from the top spot — could be the beginning of a trend.
At least, that’s what happened to Colorado last year.
The Buffs tied their team record for wins in a season with two weeks to go before the conference tournament last season. They finished 0-5 from there, including a brutal 82-68 loss to Washington State in the first round of the Pac-12 Tournament. The Buffs never pulled within single digits in the game’s final 30 minutes.
So how do you avoid letting a heart-breaking loss turn into a major slump?
“The way you do that — number one, I don’t think it has anything to do with last year and I’m not even worried about that — but the way you do that is you come back the next day, and we’ll take tomorrow off, but you come back the next practice and you get after it,” Boyle said. “You get better and you learn and you improve, and then you just figure out how you win the next game.”
To win the next game, the Buffs will likely have to play much better defense, especially on the perimeter. Utah’s Alfonso Plummer missed much of the first half with foul trouble. After scoring two points total in the game’s first 32-plus minutes, he dropped 21 in the final 7:49.
Plummer deserves loads of credit for what he did for his team on Saturday but the Buffs gave him plenty of help. They let him get open a couple of times in Utah’s settled offense, but the bulk of his damage was done in transition after Colorado missed shots.
“He had a couple threes in transition,” point guard McKinley Wright IV said after the game. “He was coming off screens. He got fouled on one. He got downhill on switches, we had to find a way to level him off, and he got hot and made a bunch down the stretch.”
That can’t happen again against Arizona State on Thursday night.
“They have some guys that can get hot like Plummer did,” Boyle said. “We’re going to have to hang our hat on our defense and our toughness.”
And things won’t get easier after the Sun Devils leave town. Arizona will be up next on Saturday and the Wildcats have won four of their last five after starting 3-3 in Pac-12 play. Colorado will wrap up the five-game homestand on the following Monday against Oregon State before taking the road for five in a row.
If the Buffs can win out in this homestand, they’ll still be in solid shape in the standings. If they drop one they’ll probably need to compensate by pulling four or five wins out of the road trip, if they want any shot at a regular season crown.
And that’s assuming there’s as much of the season left as there appears to be.
“Some teams may not get their twenty games in,” Boyle said. “Hopefully we will. This one stings because it was a home game that we had in hand. We just didn’t finish. This stings. There is no way to sugarcoat this. It stings and it sucks. It has to piss us off enough to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Andy Katz of NCAA.come released a bracket prediction for the NCAA Tournament and didn’t include Colorado in the field. Despite Colorado’s ugly losses, ESPN’s bracketology still projects the Buffs as No. 7 seeds in the tournament and the Buffs rank 20th in the NET rankings and first in the Pac-12.
In the grand scheme of things, sitting in fourth place in a conference that will likely send four or even five teams to the national tournament isn’t all that bad. A one-game lead and a win in hand over the fifth-place team makes the situation better.
The Buffs are still in good position and that’s why Colorado can remain confident.
“This loss is not going to affect our confidence, I truly, truly believe that,” Boyle said. “It has to a piss us off. It has to piss are guys off enough where they say, ‘you know what, this is never going to happen again’. We have to get an edge to us like, ‘this is unacceptable’. If we can do that, we’ll be fine. If we don’t, then the next game is gonna be tough because Arizona State is a good team.”
Wright has confidence that the team won’t lose faith.
“It’s the bond that we have,” Wright said. “We’re a really tight group. Nobody’s going to give up on each other, coaches are not going to give up on us. We know we’re capable of. Coach, always stresses that we have to keep our foot on the gas, and tonight we let up.”
Hopefully the same won’t be said Thursday night.
