Colorado-Utah Quotes
Colorado Head Coach Tad Boyle
General
“Our defense wasn’t good enough tonight, Utah came in here and schooled us. We can’t have as many breakdowns as we did. We didn’t play very smart, we didn’t play very together. In the first half our offense got selfish and took bad shots, that caused some problems for us. I thought in the second half our offense was much better but our defense wasn’t good enough.
On What Was Lacking
“Lack of concentration. Lack of effort, at times. Those are the two things."
On Whether He Thought Energy and Effort Were Lacking
“In the second half I saw better energy and effort. I’m not saying our guys went out there and laid an egg, but it wasn’t good enough consistently. Consistency is this teams Achilles heel. Playing close games late in the year, your Achilles heel gets exposed and our Achilles heel got exposed tonight. We cut the margin to 6 multiple times, we scored 52 points in the second half, but we couldn’t get stops. We need to play smarter defensively.”
On Having to Coach Concentration and Other Inconsistency This Late in the Season
“It’s really frustrating. Extremely frustrating, probably past frustrating. I’m to the anger stage."
On Derrick White’s Play
“Terrific. I don’t know where we’d be without him. I thought he made a few questionable decisions with the ball in the first half. Look, he had 5 assists, 31 points, 10 for 17… Derrick White is not our problem right now."
On What Team Needs Moving Forward
“They’ve got to do some soul searching. They need to figure out what they want out of the rest of this season. We knew what was in front of us, and we didn’t get it done tonight. Are we going to get it done against Stanford? I don’t know. But this team needs to do some soul searching, and decide how they want to be remembered."
Colorado Players
Derrick White, Sr., G
On His Dunk“I was just trying to finish at the hoop. It was only two points though.”
On What Was Lacking Tonight
“Energy and effort. We needed that one stop to put us over the edge in this one. We were only lacking four or five points.”
George King, Jr., G
On What Was Lacking Tonight“Energy and effort. Just our willingness to compete. It’s kind of frustrating. Collectively as a team we weren’t competing hard enough.”
On How The Team Can Keep Energy Up Consistently
“I don’t know, I really don’t.”
Utah Head Coach Larry Krystowiak
On His Emotions Throughout The Game“I was nervous the whole game. We made some free throws and kept our turnovers down for the most part. We had a couple glitches but there were two plays at the end where Kyle Kuzma had an assist to David Collette and then we had a three-pass corner three pointer. Both were big. There’s a correlation where when we think we’re going to do it ourselves we don’t look as good as when we decide to share the basketball. Our themes this week were taking care of the ball and sharing it. We did have a hard time playing without fouling them. We knew coming in CU led the conference in free throw attempts and we struggled with that. We also struggled with rebounding late but we made enough plays.”
On Where He Believed The Game Was Won
“We only had 10 turnovers. Colorado’s one of the top offensive rebounding teams in the conference. They had 12 of them but tonight we were even on the boards. We didn’t get outrebounded and there’s been many a years we’ve come in here and got out-rebounded by 15 or 20 rebounds. For the most part, especially in the first half, we did a nice job. Our defense was good overall. We did a nice job of mixing up some man and zone defenses and it was a defensive focus that really led to the victory.”
On Guarding Derrick White’s 30 Point Night
“We’ve always done a nice job in the past of keeping the leading scorers from doing their thing. That kid (Derrick White) has been carrying their team and doing a nice job so it’s definitely something that we need to talk about.”