Posts tagged Sophomore Spencer Dinwiddie
CU men fade in the first round of NCAA tournament
Mar 22nd
Buffs Furious Rally Can’t Overcome Illini
By B.G. Brooks, CUBuffs.com Contributing Editor
AUSTIN, Texas – Colorado caught Illinois with a furious second-half comeback here Friday, but the Buffaloes couldn’t make their inspired run – or their stay in the NCAA Tournament – last.
The seventh-seeded Illini withstood the Buffs’ rally then staged one of their own, eliminating No. 10 seed CU 57-49. Illinois (23-12) advances to play second-seed Miami, a runaway 78-49 winner over No. 15 seed Pacific earlier Friday afternoon, in Sunday’s third round.
“I told our team I’m proud of what they’ve done this year, with a young group,” said CU coach Tad Boyle. 
“We’ve put Colorado basketball on the map, but we’ve got a lot of work we need to do . . . I’m proud of what Colorado basketball is in the process of becoming.”
The Buffs posted their third consecutive 20-win season (21-12) and earned back-to-back NCAA Tournament trips for the first time in 50 years. But they left the Erwin Center believing this season ended prematurely.
CU trailed by 16 points (37-21) at halftime, but opened the second half with a 23-2 run and went up 44-39 with just under 10 minutes to play. The Buffs held the Illini without a second-half field goal until 8:33 remained in the game, but a 13-2 run gave Illinois a 52-46 lead with under a minute to play and CU couldn’t catch up again.
After finally overtaking the Illini, the Buffs got only two field goals in the last 5:40. And as CU came up with its string of empty possessions, senior guard Brandon Paul was hitting six of six free throws in the final minute to give Illinois the bare amount of offense it needed.
Boyle said his players showed “extreme heart” in coming back, but “we just didn’t have enough of what it took in key possessions of the game, some offensive and some defensive, to finish this thing off. Illinois made more plays down the stretch than we did.”
Junior Andre Roberson, one of the top rebounders in the NCAA, will decide in going pro in the next few weeks
Paul led the Illini with 17 points, while D.J. Richardson had 14. Askia Booker topped CU with 14 points and was the only CU player in double figures. Josh Scott contributed a game-high 14 rebounds. Andre Roberson, the nation’s No. 2 rebounder entering the tournament, was limited to nine points and eight boards.
In catching the Illini and taking the lead in the second half, Booker said the Buffs “were getting stop after stop and pushing it down their throats. And coach made some great calls for certain plays to be run and we executed very well . . . we felt like had the momentum in our hands.
“But give credit to Illinois for finding the open man and knocking down the shots; that’s something they do very well.”
Sophomore Spencer Dinwiddie, CU’s leading scorer (15.6 ppg), saw his court time diminished by four fouls and was held to six points, with four assists and four of his team’s 15 turnovers. They cost CU 21 points, 15 of them in the first half coming from eight turnovers.
Boyle said the Illini “did a good job on Spencer. They showed hard on those ball screens and tried to get the ball out of his hands . . . Four assists, four turnovers is not a normal line for Spencer. He wasn’t at his best (Friday), but foul trouble had something to do with that.”
The Buffs became the first of five Pac-12 Conference teams in the NCAAs to lose. The league went 3-0 on Thursday, with Oregon, California and Arizona advancing. UCLA was to play Minnesota here later Friday night.
The Buffs entered the game knowing their opponent lived by the long ball, and for just over eight minutes they kept the Illini from doing their normal damage from beyond the arc.
But when the treys began to rain, CU seemed helpless to stop the deluge. Paul started it with a triple at the 11:50 mark, giving Illinois its first lead (16-15) since 2-1. Then, back-to-back three-pointers by Tyler Griffey and Richardson, followed by two free throws by Tracy Abrams capped an 11-2 run and pushed the Illini up 24-17.
The Buffs rallied briefly, getting baskets from Scott and Roberson to pull to within 24-21. But another barrage of threes was headed in the Buffs’ direction.
After Abrams and Richardson each hit two pointers, both stepped back beyond the arc – and no one in a CU uniform went with them. Richardson knocked down consecutive treys and Abrams followed with one just before the halftime buzzer, completing a 13-0 Illinois run and putting CU in a 37-21 halftime hole. It was only the Buffs’ third double-figure deficit of the season, but the second in a row (Kansas in non-conference play, Arizona in the Pac-12 Tournament).
Six of Illinois’ last eight field goals were three-pointers, and that first-half total of made treys was the most since Hartford hit seven in 40 minutes on Dec. 29 in Boulder. Illinois averaged 7.8 successful threes per game this season – the most in the Big Ten Conference.
CU was out-of-synch offensively, with its 21 points the lowest first-half total since managing only 20 at Washington nearly two months ago in a 64-54 loss. And trailing at the half wasn’t a good sign for the Buffs: they were 5-7 in such games before Friday.
Boyle said his halftime message to his players was to climb back into the game “one possession at a time . . . we cannot be happy trading baskets with them. And we have to get stops; we don’t have a 16-point play in our playbook.”
If CU was going to recover, a quick second-half start was mandatory – and they got it with a 9-2 run keyed by back-to-back treys by Booker. His second three pulled the Buffs to within 39-30 with 17:52 to play and prompted a timeout from first-year Illini coach John Groce.
The short break didn’t help. After a short jumper by Scott, Booker struck again in transition from the right wing. His third trey in 2:25 brought the Buffs to within four points (39-35), and they completed their comeback on a basket by Scott that gave CU a 40-39 lead – its first since 17-16.
The Buffs went up 44-39 before the Illini got a layup by Abrams – their first second-half field goal – with 8:33 to play, cutting CU’s lead to 44-41.
One of two free throws by Griffey trimmed the margin to 44-42 at the 8:11 mark, then back-to-back treys by Richardson and Paul – the two biggest of the Illini’s eight treys – capped a 9-0 run and pushed Illinois back in front 48-44 with 6:00 remaining.
CU’s last field goal – a jumper by Dinwiddie – came with 5:40 remaining. After that, the Buffs came up empty on too many possessions to threaten again. After Dinwiddie’s basket, CU’s next field goal was a three-pointer by Xavier Johnson with 17 seconds left and that got them only to within seven points.
Time had run out on CU, and Boyle was left with time to reflect then look forward. He said Roberson, who has until April 28 to make a decision about declaring his eligibility for the NBA Draft, plans to spend some time with his family in San Antonio over spring. Boyle will then talk with the 6-7 forward about his future.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of improvement and gaining some national respect,” Boyle said. “And it’s incumbent on every person in our basketball program, whether it’s the head coach, assistant coaches, or players, to give everything they’ve got in this off-season.
“We’ll take some time, get our batteries recharged. But just because we’re going to be a year older next year doesn’t mean we’re going to be a year better. Our players need to understand that . . . we have still got plenty of room for improvement and this isn’t our last time here, I promise you that.”
[includeme src=”http://c1n.tv/boulder/media/bouldersponsors.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”670″ height=”300″]
Huskies Put The Bite On Frigid Buffs
Jan 17th
By B.G. Brooks, CUBuffs.com Contributing Editor
SEATTLE – The Colorado Buffaloes dug themselves a hole with frigid shooting here Wednesday night and left Alaska Airlines Arena in a deeper Pac-12 Conference hole.
But despite their 64-54 loss to streaking Washington, which won for the tenth time in 12 games, Buffs coach Tad Boyle and his players believe positive steps were taken – particularly on defense. Boyle said his team’s defense “was good enough to win . . . our guys played great (defense). We played with pride and some toughness. We lost to a good basketball team.”
The Huskies, playing their first home game since Dec. 22, remained unbeaten (4-0) in conference play and went to 12-5 overall while the Buffs slipped to 1-4, 11-6. If CU’s ‘D’ was exemplary, its ‘O’ was of the OMG variety. Credit the Huskies for some of that misfiring; they’ve now held four Pac-12 teams to under 40 percent from the field.
The Buffs shot a season-low 29.2 percent in the first half and finished at 36.2 percent (21-for-58) for the game – the team’s second-lowest mark this season. CU also tied a season low in assists with six and made only one of 10 three-point attempts. But the Buffs held the Huskies to 33.9 percent (20-for-59) from the field and outrebounded them by one (38-37). It wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing game for either team, but UW coach Lorenzo Romar didn’t care.
Asked about “winning ugly,” Romar said, “You can color it any want to color it. I just know that when you go out and you play two games in a row and you have single digit turnovers (UW had 9, CU 12), you hold four teams to under 40 percent from the field, you outrebound three out of the four, you’re beginning to do things right. The only ‘ugly’ thing, if you want to call it that, is that we haven’t been making shots. Two out of the last four games we haven’t made shots. Other than that, I think we’re doing everything else OK.”
Boyle said the Huskies’ 15 offensive rebounds “really killed us in the second half. We had some stops and couldn’t finish the possession with getting the rebound. That hurt us. And then we put them on the foul line in the second half. For some reason we don’t get to the foul line on the road; I don’t know why.”
Sophomore Spencer Dinwiddie, who led CU with 15 points, said the Buffs played with more overall intensity than in previous conference losses to Arizona, Arizona State and UCLA.
“For sure,” Dinwiddie said. “That’s one thing we talked about. We talked our positives; we finally started playing with our principles – we rebounded the ball decently. There were a couple of possessions where they got three or four offensive rebounds. If we cut that out and they don’t make a run, the game’s different.”
The only other CU player in double figures was junior Andre Roberson with 10 points, marking the first time this season only two Buffs reached double digits. Roberson also had 11 rebounds for his seventh double-double of the season and the 32nd of his career.
Roberson said the Buffs “stepped it up big time on the defensive end . . . we just didn’t get the rebounds when it mattered and we didn’t make the tough stops. Our offense has to get better; our motion is terrible right now. That’s one thing we have to improve on big time. Just executing on the offense end is a main thing. That’s why we struggled with this team.”
Sophomore guard Askia Booker fouled out with 34.4 seconds to play after scoring nine points, while freshman forwards Xavier Johnson and Josh Scott had nine and eight, respectively. Scott got all of his points in the second half.
The Huskies’ C.J. Wilcox, the conference’s leading scorer (21.3 ppg), finished with 25, while teammate Scott Suggs added 13. UW had no other double-figure scorers, but Desmond Simmons (12) and Aziz N’Diaye (11) accounted for 23 rebounds.
CU scored a season-low 20 points in the first half and trailed by eight at intermission. The Huskies opened 10-point leads three times in the game’s final 8 minutes, an 11-point advantage in the last 3 minutes, and never allowed their visitors closer than seven points during that span. Trailing 28-20 at intermission, the Buffs might have gone to their locker room thankful for that deficit. When they caught the Huskies at 17-17 on a layup by Johnson – he started against in place of Sabatino Chen – they appeared to have corrected their early problems.
CU committed four of its seven first-half turnovers – a high for a half in league play – in the game’s first 6 minutes and fell behind by seven points. Then the Buffs strung together an 8-2 run – their most productive offensive stretch of the opening half – and pulled even.
But things went south from there. After Johnson’s layup produced the tie at 17 with 8:56 left before the break, CU scored only three more points to finish with its lowest first-half total of the season.
The Buffs opened the second half with three points from Roberson and pulled to within 28-23. But the Huskies trumped that with a four-point play from Scott Suggs to take their largest lead of the night – 32-23 – to that point. The nine-point advantage became 10 (37-27) on a trey by Wilcox. But taking advantage of the 7-foot N’Diaye taking a rest, the 6-10 Scott hit back-to-back baskets to draw the Buffs to within five (39-34) with just over 11 minutes to play.
CU’s threat ended there. A 5-0 run restored U-Dub’s 10-point lead (48-38), leaving the Buffs just over 7 minutes to retaliate. Boyle called a timeout at the 7:12 mark, but the closest his team could get was 52-45 on a three-point play by Dinwiddie with 3:52 to play.
“With our defense tonight and our pride, I’m proud of our guys for the way they hung in there,” Boyle said. “It got away from us at the end there and you look at a 10-point loss on the road and we couldn’t shrink the lead because we couldn’t score. But it wasn’t because of our defense.”
The Buffs’ road trip continues with a Saturday game (8 p.m. MST) at Washington State. The team will fly via charter on Thursday morning from Seattle to Spokane, have Thursday and Friday practices at Gonzaga, then fly to Pullman on Saturday morning.
[includeme src=”http://c1n.tv/boulder/media/bouldersponsors.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”670″ height=”300″]
