Buffs Celebrate Honors, But Focus Is On Tourney Opener Vs. Cal
March 11, 2019 | Men's Basketball, Neill Woelk
BOULDER — On a day when the Colorado Buffaloes celebrated a host of honors, business still needed to be addressed.
Specifically, the business of the Pac-12 tournament, in which the fifth-seeded Buffs will begin play Wednesday in a 3:30 p.m. (Mountain time) game against No. 12 Cal. The winner will take on No. 4 Oregon State on Thursday.
Monday, Colorado sophomores McKinley Wright IV and Tyler Bey were named first-team all-Pac-12, making the Buffs one of only two teams — Washington being the other — with two players on the 10-member first team. Bey was also named the conference's Most Improved Player, and he also reaped Pac-12 Player of the Week honors for his role in leading the Buffs to back-to-back wins over UCLA and USC. Wright, meanwhile, was named honorable mention all-defensive team.
"Well deserving," head coach Tad Boyle said. "Any time you get all-conference honors, they are truly honors because they are voted on by your peer coaches. We cannot vote for our own players. I can't vote for McKinley, I can't vote for Tyler. They're voted on by the other 11 coaches, so that when that comes out like that, it's a great honor for them. It shows some respect those players have earned from their opposing coaches."
But while honors are nice, they won't score a single point or grab one rebound in the conference tournament. Thus, after a day off Sunday, the Buffs' focus was squarely on Cal on Monday.
Colorado (19-11 overall, 10-8 Pac-12) enters the tournament on a roll, having won three in a row and eight of its last 10. But the Bears (8-22, 3-15) also enter on a hot streak. Cal ended a 16-game losing streak two weeks ago with a win over conference champ Washington, followed it up with a victory over Washington State, and then collected a road win at Stanford.
Thus, while a No. 12 seed, the Bears have played much, much better of late.
"I see a talented group of players that are resilient," Boyle said. "We talk about youth, they don't have a senior. They have guys that are really young and learning and are freshmen and sophomores and a couple juniors. … They have good players."
But what Boyle has spent the last couple of days trying to impress upon his players is that the Bears will be coming into the game with some confidence in a tournament that just about anyone in the bracket is capable of winning — or at least posting an upset or two.
"It's a new season for us and it's a new season for Cal," he said. "We've won three straight, they've won three straight. This is the time of year you throw records out the window because everybody's zero and zero."
Boyle, who is 8-0 in conference tournament openers with the Buffs, doesn't want to be a victim of one of those upsets.
"I haven't talked to our guys about (CU's tourney opening streak), but it's something our staff takes a lot of pride in," he said. "I've always felt like in tournament play the teams that are tougher and that execute better and want to win more are the ones that usually do. It's the toughness, it's the want-to and it's execution. You can't go there and throw the ball all over the gym and not execute your stuff on offense and not know your assignments on defense. You just have to go with a grit and a toughness that we're not going home."
The Buffs won't be packing for just one night in Las Vegas. Colorado won the first-ever Pac-12 tournament in 2012 by winning four games in a row, a feat that hasn't been accomplished since. Colorado is 17-6 in the tournament all-time, with five of those losses coming against Arizona in six tries. The Buffs likely won't see the Wildcats this year, as Arizona would have to get past USC and Washington.
While CU is by no means looking past Cal, they wouldn't mind an extended stay.
"It's win or go home time," Boyle said. "The next loss we have, we're coming home from Vegas. We want to hopefully extend thatstrip as long as we can. I know Cal does to and so does everybody else there."
Contact: Neill.Woelk@Colorado.edu
Â
