BOULDER — McKinley Wright IV has a list.
“I’ wanted to be Player of the Year, I wanted to go back or go dancing—we had that chance last year, didn’t happen to the COVID—and you know, we put ourselves in position to go dancing. And I want to win the Pac-12 championship and we have a chance to do that,” Wright told reporters Tuesday.
Wright missed out on Pac-12 Player of the Year, as it was announced Tuesday that USC big man Evan Mobley won the award, but Wright came away with his third first-team All-Pac-12 nod and an honorable mention spot on the All-Defense team.
The rest of the items on his list are still on the table, but it’s time to start filling it out.
“I made a checklist and I’m trying to check everything off,” Wright said. “And right now we got a chance to go and win a Pac-12 championship.”
Wright’s Colorado Buffaloes have a bye in the first round, their first ever in the Pac-12, so they won’t play until late Thursday night. They’ll take on the winner of Wednesday’s nightcap, Stanford vs. Cal. Wright holds a career 3-3 record in the Pac-12 Tournament and he’ll need to improve that record to 6-3 to take the crown.
But Colorado is coming off its worst loss in Pac-12 Tournament history; the Buffs capped off their 2019-20 season with an 82-68 first-round loss to Washington State. It was the first time that Colorado had lost a first-round game in the Pac-12 Tournament, as well as the first time that Colorado had lost to a team that finished lower in the Pac-12 standings than the Buffs in the Pac-12 Tournament.
“We remember that the sour taste we had in our mouth last year when; went in as a higher seed and lost to Washington State,” Wright said. “Now this year, we’ve kind of done a better job of not taking games for granted. Now, besides our three bad losses that we have, we’ve done a really good job throughout the season of taking every game, I’m not taking opponents lightly.”
Those three losses are a big caveat. If Colorado had won two of those games, it would have been the No. 1 seed and regular season champion.
Regardless, the Buffs have set themselves up much better this year than they did last year. Colorado gets to sit out the first round and play the winner of the No. 6 vs. No. 11 matchup. Last year, they lost in the No. 6 vs. No. 11 game.
Luckily, they learned.
“Going into this Pac 12 tournament anything can happen as you saw last year, we lost the Washington State,” Wright said. “We’ve got that mindset and that understanding that we can’t go in overlooking teams. Now we don’t know who we play first; the winner of Stanford and Cal.Stanford’s a really talented team, and now with a lot of high-caliber players on that roster, and Cal is a team that we overlooked and they beat us at their place. So I think we got that mindset. Now I’m going into this tournament that we can’t overlook nobody.”
Colorado’s identity is defense and that’s part of the reason effort is so important; if you’re a defensive team that doesn’t give full effort on defense, then what are you?
For the most part, defense hasn’t been an issue for Colorado, and that should have been expected. The Buffs have plus defenders all over the roster, including Wright. Last year, Colorado’s Tyler Bey was named Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year but head coach Tad Boyle told reporters that Wright was actually the better defender. This year, Wright seemed like a near-lock for the conference All-Defense team, but he was outshone on the defensive end by another guard on his own team, Eli Parquet, who got the All-Defense nod.
It’s safe to say that Colorado has the best defensive backcourt in the conference.
“That’s all coach stresses every day in practice; we got to be able to guard the ball, guard our yard, three feet to the left, three feet to the right. If we get beat we got to have help side. If a guy comes to help, we got to crack down,” Wright said. “Defense is everything in this program. And it’s been that way since I’ve gotten here.”
The focus on defense is paying off.
“It’s obviously areas we can improve on and we’ve watched film and we tried to improve day-by-day,” Wright said, “but I think we’re one of the better defensive teams and this conference and the country as well.”
If Wright is correct in his analysis, the Buffs could have plenty of basketball left in the tank this season. But nothing is guaranteed in March.
“We know there’s a target on our back,” Wright said. “It wasn’t before this season, you know, they picked us seventh, we finished third, had a chance to finish first and we let three of them, we let three of them slip.”
Wright appears to be on a mission to prove Colorado didn’t deserve to be picked seventh.
“They have no choice but to pay us some attention and respect going into this tournament,” Wright said. “And especially the media, the coaches, whoever picked us seventh, I don’t know who it was, but they picked tush’s seventh. So we’re here now. We finished third, we got our buy, they didn’t expect us to do this. And there’s more that they don’t expect us to do that we plan on doing, so we have a chip on our shoulder and a target on our back and just got to keep moving.”
