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CU gets payback for home loss, advances PAC-12 tournament to another possible payback
Mar 14th
The opportunity for payback came quickly for the Colorado Buffaloes and they didn’t let it pass. Beaten and embarrassed last weekend on their home court by lowly Oregon State, the Buffs regrouped and eliminated the Beavers 74-68 on Wednesday in the first round of the Pac-12 Conference Tournament.
And the second round brings another opponent the Buffs and their fans might always feel is owed a little something.
No. 5 seeded CU (21-10) advances to face No. 4 seed Arizona (24-6) on Thursday. The Buffs and Wildcats split their two regular-season meetings, each team winning at home but Arizona needing a disallowed three-pointer at the buzzer to win in the teams’ conference opener in overtime in Tucson.
“Yeah, we do feel like we’re 2-0 (against the Wildcats),” said CU sophomore guard Spencer Dinwiddie, who led the Buffs with 20 points on Wednesday, including eight straight after the Beavers had pulled to within a point in the second half. “We don’t go back and cry over spilled milk. We know it goes in the record book as a loss.
“But a lot of people around the country have the same feeling that we do. Even some of their players do because
we kind of talked about it on the floor last time (in CU’s 71-58 Valentine’s Night win in Boulder).”
Game three of the growing rivalry tips Thursday at 3:30 p.m. MDT (Pac-12 Network) in the MGM Grand Garden Arena. “I think there is a lot of mutual respect between the programs, and I respect their coach and their coaching staff,” CU coach Tad Boyle said. “I think what we did last year, and this year and these young men sitting beside me, I think we’ve earned some respect as well. So I look for a heck of a game.”
CU defeated Arizona twice last season, the final time (53-51) for the inaugural Pac-12 championship in Los Angeles. Out of that game, followed by Sabatino Chen’s waived-off buzzer beater on Jan. 3 in Tucson, burst a rivalry.
But to force another meeting, the Buffs had to dispose of the Beavers (14-18) Wednesday. And in Boyle’s words, the disposal process was unsightly. “Sometimes in tournament games you’ve got to win ugly,” he said, adding he couldn’t remember when his team shot from beyond the three-point arc (43.8 percent) than in front of it (39.3).
But in the second game with OSU in five days, CU had something that was missing on Saturday in Boulder – junior forward Andre Roberson, who returned after missing two games with a viral illness. He scored 12 points, added seven rebounds and, according to OSU coach Craig Robinson, was Wednesday’s difference-maker.
Asked that specifically, Robinson answered, “Is that a trick question, or did you not see Andre Roberson out there?”
Without ‘Dre’ last Saturday, the Buffs were outrebounded by the Beavers 38-32. With him back in the lineup, and with Josh Scott contributing 10 boards – eight big ones in the first half – and Xavier Johnson getting eight more, CU outrebounded OSU 43-30.
Roberson also was enough of an inside presence on the defensive end to help limit the Beavs to 39.7 percent from the field. He also contributed to CU having an 18-12 advantage in second-chance points.
“Roberson gave them a different look,” said OSU guard Roberto Nelson, who led his team with 20 points. “He does a lot for their team. There’s a reason he’s one of the best players in the league.”
But ‘Dre’ said he didn’t feel like that in his return to the court. “I was just trying to work myself back into shape and get the rustiness out,” he said, undoubtedly alluding to his five turnovers. “When you haven’t played in a long time, hadn’t touched the ball or run or anything . . . hey, I was relying on one day and that was (Tuesday). I felt like I did a pretty good job actually.”
He entered the tournament as the nation’s leading rebounder (11.5 rpg) and said this of Wednesday’s effort: “I slacked a little bit on the rebounding end. But I’ll pick it up (Thursday).”
In addition to Dinwiddie’s 20 and Roberson’s 12, CU got 16 points from Johnson and eight first-half points off the bench from Jeremy Adams, who continues to be a late-season force. Boyle said Adams “gave us some great first-half minutes . . . he made some shots (and) is a lockdown-type defender. I think I’d put him in there with ‘Sab’ (Sabatino Chen) and Andre in terms of his understanding of our defensive concept.”
Roberson, the Pac-12’s Defensive Player of The Year, knocked down a three-pointer followed by a pair of free throws that gave the Buffs a 12-point lead (61-49) with 2:43 remaining. It was CU’s largest advantage of the afternoon, with Roberson’s trey the Buffs’ final field goal of the game.
Oregon State pulled to within five points in the final three minutes, but CU hit 15 of 21 throws in the last 2:43 to advance against No. 18 Arizona. The Buffs are 4-2 against ranked opponents this season, their most wins in that category since the 2002-03 season.
After a back-and-forth first half Wednesday, the Buffs took 32-26 lead at intermission – and they did it dramatically. After a Beavers turnover with 1.1 seconds remaining, Chen inbounded the ball just across the mid-court line to Dinwiddie, who cleared himself to shoot with two dribbles and let his shot fly.
The horn sounded with the ball in the air – and CU had its fourth (and longest) three-pointer of the first half in 11 attempts.
Said Dinwiddie: “I just wanted to get open and get it up there . . . It gave us momentum; they had just come back.”
Prior to their six-point halftime advantage, the Buffs had led by as many as seven before the Beavs regrouped and tied the score at 23-23 with a 7-0 run. They made it a 10-2 spurt and went up 26-25 before CU closed out the half with a short jumper by Scott, a pair of free throws by Chen and Dinwiddie’s half-court swish.
At tip-off all CU eyes were on Roberson, who was cleared to play in the tournament on Tuesday morning. Roberson started, took a break at the 14:23 mark, then reentered the game with 12:13 remaining.
But less than three minutes later, with 10:47 left before intermission, Roberson picked up his second personal foul and went to the bench for the remainder of the half. If he needed rest, he hadn’t figured on getting it this way. He finished the half with two points and one rebound in seven minutes.
Oregon State, which defeated CU 64-58 last Saturday, crept to within 53-46 before Askia Booker hit a triple to put the Buffs back in front by double-digits (56-46). Booker had been scoreless (0-8 from the field) until that basket.
“I mentioned to our staff in the locker room (that) he was one-for-nine,” said Boyle, “but the one he hit was a big-time shot.”
Still, the Beavers were intent on making it a close game. When Ahmad Starks drained a three with 1:54 to play, his team trailed by only 63-57, and a trey by Eric Moreland (14 points, 13 rebounds) made it a five-point game (65-60) with 1:35 left.
A three-point play by Nelson pulled the Beavs to 72-68 in the final 10 seconds, but Dinwiddie’s final pair of free throws with 6.5 left sealed it and sent the Buffs into Thursday’s second round against the Wildcats.
Dinwiddie said the Buffs “have to stick with what we do – hold them to under 40 percent field goal percentage and outrebound them. (Then) we have a good shot at winning the game. That’s pretty much our focus every game. They’re a team that plays pretty stout defense. I guess a lot of people kind of say they’ve turned into our rivals because we’ve faced them so many times . . . faced them in the (Pac-12) championship last year. They’re always a great match up.”
Added Roberson: “They’re a great program. They play just like us – same philosophies. It’s like the cat going to get the mice; we’ve got to come hungry . . . and be ready to play.”
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CU women fall to Stanford
Mar 10th
Story by B.G. Brooks, Contributing Editor, CUBuffs.com
The usual script for the CU women is to struggle in the first half and come back in the second to win. Stanford reversed the script Saturday night.
For just over a half Saturday night, the Colorado Buffaloes showed they could stay with powerful Stanford. Staying with Chiney Ogwumike and remaining in touch with their game proved to be much more difficult for the Buffs.
Behind Ogwumike’s 25 points and 19 rebounds, the top-seeded Cardinal finally pulled away from the fourth-seeded Buffs for a 61-47 win and advanced to Sunday’s Pac-12 Conference Tournament championship game at KeyArena.
The fourth-ranked Cardinal (30-2) plays No. 3 seed UCLA (25-6), which upset No. 5 seed California 70-58 in Saturday night’s first semifinal.
“I’m proud of how we played; we played hard the whole game,” CU coach Linda Lappe said. “I liked how intense we were for about 30 minutes and then I thought our missed shots began to affect our demeanor . . .
“Stanford is a good team for a reason; they execute when they need to execute. We’ve got to understand that teams that are good are going to make runs and not beat themselves. We have to go get it. As you get in the NCAA Tournament you understand it’s one-and-done . . . I have no doubt we’ll be ready to go.”
Losing for the first time in 11 games, the No. 18 Buffs (25-6) now will wait until Selection Sunday to see their NCAA future – and it should be bright. CU hosts first- and second-round NCAA Women’s Tournament games at the Coors Events Center on March 23-25. Chances appear good that the Buffs will open the tournament on their home court.
The Buffs held a 28-27 halftime lead Saturday night, with their defense to thank. The Cardinal shot just 28.1 percent (9-for-32) in the first 20 minutes, and had it not been for Ogwumike, Stanford would have been deep in the woods with no way out.
The 6-4 junior was scoreless for the game’s first nine minutes, but once she got going, the Buffs had a hard time handling her.
“She’s good . . . a tough load in there,” Lappe said. “She plays a lot of minutes, she’s fit, strong and has a good skill set. I thought we made her work for everything she got – that was one of our goals. I thought in the end her rebounding hurt more than anything else.”
Lappe was right about the Buffs making Ogwumike work for her points. In her 39 minutes, Ogwumike hit just nine of her 24 field goal attempts but was 7-for-10 from the free throw line. The Cardinal attempted 29 free throws, making 22, while the Buffs only attempted four, making three of those.
Over the first half’s last 11 minutes Ogwumike scored 14 of the Cardinal’s 18 points. And by halftime she had a double-double, collecting 10 of Stanford’s 21 first-half rebounds. The Cardinal won the board battle 43-37. Stanford also outscored CU 26-16 in the paint and got 18 points off of the Buffs’ 15 turnovers. The Cardinal committed 10, resulting in 13 Buffs points.
Stanford, said CU senior Chucky Jeffery, “started getting the ball into Chiney and started knocking down shots . . . we weren’t making shots and that got us in a little slump. We couldn’t sustain anything and couldn’t get on a run to answer. Bottom line is we couldn’t knock down our shots.”
CU junior post Rachel Hargis opened on Ogwumike and was doing a credible job until picking up her second foul. The defensive chore then went to, among others, redshirt freshman Arielle Roberson and true freshman Jamee Swan.
“She’s a really good player, very strong, physical and active,” Roberson said. “We managed and held our own for a time.”
During that time, the Buffs needed to be more efficient offensively, but couldn’t. “Defensively we were outstanding,” Lappe said. “Without the last few minutes there we held them to about 55 points (it was 55-42 with about six minutes remaining). And when you hold Stanford to 55 points you have to win. We missed a lot of good shots, we took good shots, but we didn’t knock them down. You can only hold them for so long before they start to build that gap.”
With a team-high 19 points, Jeffery moved into sixth place on the school’s career scoring list. Roberson added 10 points and eight rebounds, and junior Brittany Wilson added contributed six points, three of them on the 100th three-pointer of her career.
If the Buffs were leading by only a point at halftime, they believed they were sending a larger message. At halftime of their first meeting in Boulder, CU trailed by 17. Three weeks later at Stanford, the Buffs trailed by nine at the break.
The Buffs went on to lose both games by double figures, so Saturday night they measured major progress at halftime with a single digit. Lappe liked her team’s first-half effort, but added, “We’re not into moral victories; we’re not happy that we were ahead at halftime. We wanted to win the game.”
CU got a three-pointer by Lexy Kresl to open the second half and took a 31-27 lead. But Stanford caught up quickly at 36-36 and just kept going. The Cardinal got a conventional three-point play from Amber Orrange, a Sara James trey and two free throws by Ogwumike to take a 41-36 lead with 13:05 to play.
It was the largest lead of the night by either team and in a bump-and-grind game like this it looked even larger. And it grew.
After two empty Buffs possessions, a pair of baskets by Mikaela Ruef completed a 9-0 run and opened a nine-point (45-36) Stanford lead. With 10:38 remaining, CU needed a timeout, and if the Buffs weren’t fully on the ropes, reaching out to them was no problem.
Stanford took its first double-figure lead (49-38) on a pair of Ogwumike free throws, then she added two more points with a steal and layup with just over nine minutes to play. The Cardinal increased its advantage to as many as 15 in the final three minutes.
“We competed well for a huge portion of the game,” Lappe said. “We stopped defending a little and that’s when they went on their run. We have to learn how to score and step up against good teams when they make a run.”
Jeffery said the first half and the early portion of the second 20 minutes showed the Buffs that, “We’ve got a lot of fight in us, we showed a lot of resilience in that first half. To hold the No. 4 team in the nation to that type of half was good for our team. We know what it takes and we know we have to take that extra step and put a 40-minute game together.”
The 14-point loss, she added, “doesn’t take away from our confidence . . . we’re not down. We just have to regroup for the NCAA Tournament.”
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CU women’s b-ball 25 – 5, facing #4 Stanford tonight in Pac-12 semifinals
Mar 9th
Freshman Jamie Swan’s late game baskets iced the win
Story by B.G. Brooks, CUBuffs.com
Overcoming a first half of near and sometimes bad misses, fourth-seeded CU finally took control in the final 20 minutes and ousted fifth-seeded Washington 70-59 at KeyArena.
The No. 18 Buffs (25-5) earned a Saturday night date with top-seeded Stanford (29-2) in the Pac-12 semifinals. The No. 4-ranked Cardinal, which defeated the Buffs twice during regular-season play, advanced by disposing of Washington State 79-60 in Friday night’s first game.
No. 2 seed California (28-2) and No. 3 seed UCLA (24-6) play in Saturday night’s first semifinal game. The CU-Stanford tip is scheduled for 9:30 p.m. MST (Pac-12 Network).
“There’s only one way to look at a matchup with Stanford, and that’s as an opportunity,” said CU coach Linda Lappe. “We’re going to look at it that way.”
Stanford’s two wins against CU were by 17 points (57-40) in Boulder on the opening weekend of Pac-12 play, then by three points (59-56) at Stanford on January’s last weekend. The Buffs believed they had improved at least that much from the first to the second meeting, and they believe they’re even better now.
They’ll probably need a better start than they had Friday night, when they were forced to overcome a first half that saw them miss 13 of their first 16 field goal attempts and go to their locker room to ponder their 28.9 percent (13-for-45) shooting.
“We knew we had to settle down, quit missing easy shots and quit fouling,” said senior guard Chucky Jeffery, who scored 12 of her game-high 19 points in the second half. “Now we know how the floor feels, the jitters are gone and the first (game) is out of the way. Now it’s about quick memory loss and going on to the next one – and it’s a big one. We want to come out and play better Saturday.”
Lappe used 11 players against UW (20-11) and not only did all of them score, all but one of them collected at least two rebounds and all but two contributed at least one assist. In addition to her 19 points, Jeffery also had a game-best four assists, while freshman forward Jamee Swan scored a career-high 15 points and hauled in 10 of CU’s 58 rebounds – UW had 36 – in her 19 minutes of court time.
“I feel like I played the best I ever played,” said Swan, who also blocked three shots. “It was really nice to be out there and not be afraid and have my teammates behind me.”
All of them were. CU’s bench outscored UW’s 33-18. The Buffs had 25 offensive rebounds to the Huskies’ 13, outscored them 40-18 in the paint and won the second-chance point duel 20-9.
“I like how we crashed the offensive glass,” Lappe said. “We needed to get a lot of extra shots in this game and we did. We showed a lot of resolve in chasing down loose balls to get us extra shots.”
Lappe applauded Swan and freshman guard Kyleesha Weston, who contributed two points and six rebounds in 21 minutes. “I’m really proud of our players,” Lappe said. “I thought we stepped up big at certain times . . . it seemed like whoever we brought into the game, we never missed a beat. That allowed us to get some rest so we could make a push at the end.”
In their 68-61 win over the Huskies last month in Boulder, the Buffs limited the Pac-12’s No. 2 scorer, Jazmine Davis, to nine points. Friday night, Davis got 17 – two below her average. She hit two of UW’s seven three-pointers, which were two more than CU allowed in Boulder and two above Friday night’s goal. U-Dub leads the conference in three-pointers made (8.2 a game). The Huskies’ final two treys Friday night came in the last two minutes when they were trying to cut into a 10-point Buffs lead.
UW got as close as four (63-59) before Jeffery scored five consecutive points – a jumper and three of four free throws – and Swan sank two free throws with 13 seconds left to account for a 7-0 run to close out the game.
The Buffs were up 29-26 at the half, but it took them almost 18 minutes to get their first lead. Blame that on shooting that was somewhere south of frigid. UW led by as many as six points (14-8) before the Buffs finally began finding their range – if they ever did.
Lappe said her team was “really excited to play. I think anytime that’s the case you miss some easy shots . . . but I like how we stayed with it.”
After a Jeffery three-pointer – her team’s only trey of the first half – tied the score at 23-23, she hit a pull-up jumper from the free throw line following a UW turnover to give CU its first lead, 25-23, with 2:41 before intermission.
The final 20 minutes would belong to whoever wanted them, and based on the first 21/2 it appeared that was CU. After scoring the first eight points the Buffs surged to a 37-26 lead and were threatening to rip this one open.
It didn’t happen. Talia Walton’s trey started an 8-0 UW run and Davis’ traditional three-point finished it, pulling the Huskies back to within three (37-34) with 16:09 remaining.
CU went back ahead by as many as seven points on an Ashley Wilson layup and maintained at least a four-point lead until a pair of free throws by Kristi Kingma pulled UW to 45-43 with 10:29 to play.
The Huskies could get no closer. Pulling ahead twice by 10 on a pair of layups by Swan in the final two minutes, the Buffs looked like they could begin making semifinal plans for Saturday.
But three-pointers by Heather Corral and Walton, who finished with 13, closed UW’s deficit to 63-59 with less than a minute left. Jeffery answered with a layup and three of four free throws, and when Swan sank a pair with 13 seconds remaining, those semifinal plans to face Stanford were complete.
“We’ll have to make sure we’re ready and playing really well together,” Lappe said. “They’re the giants of the Pac-12 and we’ve got a shot at them.”
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