Posts tagged Washington
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.
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Buffs Fall Hard In First True Road Test
Dec 2nd
By B.G. Brooks, Contributing Editor, CUBuffs.com
LARAMIE, Wyo. – The Colorado Buffaloes knew their first true road test of the season would be difficult, but they might have made it harder than it had to be.
Committing 17 turnovers while managing just 11 assists and allowing Wyoming’s inside game – read: Leonard Washington – to dominate, the No. 19 Buffs were overrun by the Cowboys 76-69 on Saturday night in the boisterous Arena-Auditorium.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why we lost this game,” said CU coach Tad Boyle, citing an assist-to-turnover ratio that continues to disappoint, 14 layups allowed (seven in each half) and his team permitting Wyoming to shoot 52 percent in the second half of a game that the Buffs led by two (28-26) at intermission.
Continued Boyle, who watched his team lose for the first time this season (6-1) and only the second time in its last 13 games: “I’m disappointed in our execution in the second half. We have to get better in a lot of different areas.”
The Cowboys’ 6-7 Leonard Washington scored a team-high 22 points – most of them inside as Wyoming outscored CU 30-24 in the paint. The unbeaten Cowboys (8-0) also turned the Buffs’ 17 turnovers, which tied the season high, into 20 points.
Spencer Dinwiddie led the Buffs with 24 points and Andre Roberson added 16 and 12 rebounds – his 28th career double-double. CU’s other pair of top scorers – guard Askia Booker and post Josh Scott – accounted for 11 points between them. Booker (16.8 ppg) was held to a season-low six points – a three-pointer in each half, while Scott (14.5 ppg) scored five before fouling out.
Two of Scott’s teammates – Roberson and Sabatino Chen – also fouled out. The Buffs were whistled for 27 fouls to the Cowboys’ 13, a disparity that Boyle believes worked too much on some of his players’ psyches.
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to overcome that. They can get frustrated and bitch about it all they want – it doesn’t change things. The way you do that is with mental toughness and not let it get in your head, get you out of your game.”
Boyle also pointed to a hustle play made by Washington midway through the second half that he believed epitomized the night for the Buffs. It occurred when the Cowboys began pulling away with an 11-3 run. Washington went to floor for a loose ball, corralled it and called time out. Meanwhile, five CU players bent at their waists and poked at the ball.
“He out-scrapped us and got it,” Boyle said. “He ‘beasted’ us last year (16 points in a 64-54 Wyoming win). What you saw with Leonard Washington was a senior who was playing his last time against a team like Colorado that was in the Top 25. He wanted this game . . . he took four or five charges himself. It was in the scouting report.”
The Buffs, said Boyle, failed to play hard, smart or together: “We’ve got guys who have to change their identities from offensive players to defensive players, defensive players to rebounders, screeners, passers – and then let the offense come to you . . . we’ve got a lot of guys on this team who can put the ball in the basket. Not just Josh, Ski, Spencer, Andre – guys coming off the bench can (score). But our mindset right now is not a collective one, not what it needs to be.”
Booker, who was 2-of-13 from the field (one trey in each half), “does not handle adversity well,” Boyle said. “He has to get better when his jump shot’s not going in and when the officiating isn’t bailing him out. That’s the bottom line. He knows it, I know it, the assistant coaches know it, his teammates know it. Until he does, he’s going to be frustrated on nights like this because people are going to start face-guarding him, bumping him, being physical . . . he’s got to figure it out.”
The Buffs, as a whole, have until Wednesday night to figure out how to solve the deficiencies Boyle has laid out for them. Archrival Colorado State (6-0) visits the Coors Events Center in the second game of men’s/women’s doubleheader, and if CU doesn’t improve over the next three days, CSU “will obliterate us,” Boyle said. “They’ve got a toughness about them. You talk about rebounding and defending, look at Colorado State. They rebound and defend. They’re exactly what we need to be, and that’s why they’re undefeated right now. We’ve might have lost a little bit of our hunger now, I don’t know. We’ll find out Wednesday night.”
The 6-10 Scott wouldn’t concede that the Buffs have encountered complacency. “We’re as hungry as ever,” he said. “I know all of us are really competitive, we all want to be the best we can be.”
If they weren’t at their best in Saturday night’s first half, they were close enough to stay competitive. With Wyoming’s largest crowd (8,240) in eight seasons watching, the first half might have unfolded just as CU envisioned. The Cowboys aren’t interested in getting up and down the court, and they made sure the visitors couldn’t. Neither team had a fast-break basket in the opening 20 minutes.
CU did manage a two-point lead in a first half that featured seven ties and eight lead changes, but the Buffs’ 28 points was their lowest first-half output of the season. It was an omen, for CU finished shooting 41.4 percent from the field (24-of-58) for their lowest percentage of the season.
The Buffs encountered early foul problems, with Roberson, Xavier Johnson and Josh Scott seeing their minutes limited after picking up two fouls each. Roberson played nine minutes but still had seven first-half point, tying Dinwiddie for the team lead. Scott and Johnson played 10 minutes each. The Buffs stayed close, even leading on a couple of occasions, in the first 5 minutes of the second half. It didn’t help CU when Scott was whistled for his third foul at the 12:45 mark and went to the bench for 4 minutes. Wyoming went up by six (45-39) on an inside basket and free throw by Washington and two free throws by Luke Martinez.
A Dinwiddie trey cut the deficit in half (45-42), but the Cowboys reeled off an 11-3 run and suddenly were up 51-42 with 9:16 remaining. And in this game, at Wyoming’s pace, a nine-point lead looked pretty cushy. Boyle called a timeout to settle the Buffs.
CU pulled to within five (55-50), but a Washington desperation three-pointer with the shot clock at one second restored Wyoming’s eight-point lead (58-50) at the 5:12 mark.
If the Buffs were going to remain unbeaten, it would be up to their defense. But allowing a full-court pass to Martinez on an out-of-bounds wasn’t the way to finish strong. His layup pushed the Cowboys back up by nine (61-52) with just under 4 minutes remaining – and it was all Wyoming thereafter.
Said Dinwiddie: “We didn’t play defense, plain and simple. They buckled down and made plays and we didn’t make plays.”
Dinwiddie claimed the loud Cowboys crowd didn’t disrupt the Buffs: “I don’t think so . . . we missed some shots, but I don’t think the crowd had much to do with it. The crowd doesn’t change the way the opposing team plays defense.”
Now comes CSU, which edged CU 65-64 last season in Fort Collins. Dinwiddie said Saturday night’s first loss of this season doesn’t make the Rams’ visit to Boulder any more significant: “It’s a big game either way. They’re probably going to be Top 25 now, we might or might not still. It’s our place, they beat us last year and rushed the court.
“They’re our biggest rival. You really can’t set the stage any higher than it already was . . . it’s still going to be crazy. We want to prove to ourselves more than anything (and) get back to the way we should be playing.”
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CU Boulder study: Alaska’s iconic Columbia Glacier expected to stop retreating in 2020
Nov 26th
The wild and dramatic cascade of ice into the ocean from Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, an iconic glacier featured in the documentary “Chasing Ice” and one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, will cease around 2020, according to a study by the University of Colorado Boulder.
A computer model predicts the retreat of the Columbia Glacier will stop when the glacier reaches a new stable position — roughly 15 miles upstream from the stable position it occupied prior to the 1980s. The team, headed by lead author William Colgan of the CU-Boulder headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, published its results today in The Cryosphere, an open access publication of the European Geophysical Union.
The Columbia Glacier is a large (425 square miles), multi-branched glacier in south-central Alaska that flows mostly south out of the Chugach Mountains to its tidewater terminus in Prince William Sound.
1938
Warming air temperatures have triggered an increase in the Columbia Glacier’s rate of iceberg calving, whereby large pieces of ice detach from the glacier and float into the ocean, according to Colgan. “Presently, the Columbia Glacier is calving about 2 cubic miles of icebergs into the ocean each year — that is over five times more freshwater than the entire state of Alaska uses annually,” he said. “It is astounding to watch.”
The imminent finish of the retreat, or recession of the front of the glacier, has surprised scientists and highlights the difficulties of trying to estimate future rates of sea level rise, Colgan said. “Many people are comfortable thinking of the glacier contribution to sea level rise as this nice predictable curve into the future, where every year there is a little more sea level rise, and we can model it out for 100 or 200 years,” Colgan said.
The team’s findings demonstrate otherwise, however. A single glacier’s contribution to sea level rise can “turn on” and “turn off” quite rapidly, over a couple of years, with the precise timing of the life cycle being difficult to forecast, he said. Presently, the majority of sea level rise comes from the global population of glaciers. Many of these glaciers are just starting to retreat, and some will soon cease to retreat.
2004
“The variable nature and speed of the life cycle among glaciers highlights difficulties in trying to accurately predict the amount of sea level rise that will occur in the decades to come,” Colgan said.
The Columbia Glacier was first documented in 1794 when it appeared to be stable with a length of 41 miles. During the 1980s it began a rapid retreat and by 1995 it was only about 36 miles long. By late 2000 it was about 34 miles long.
The loss of a massive area of the Columbia Glacier’s tongue has generated a tremendous number of icebergs since the 1980s. After the Exxon Valdez ran aground while avoiding a Columbia Glacier iceberg in 1989, significant resources were invested to understand its iceberg production. As a result, Columbia Glacier became one of the most well-documented tidewater glaciers in the world, providing a bank of observational data for scientists trying to understand how a tidewater glacier reacts to a warming climate.
Motivated by the compelling imagery of the Columbia Glacier’s retreat documented in the Extreme Ice Survey — James Balog’s collection of time-lapse photography of disappearing glaciers around the world — Colgan became curious as to how long the glacier would continue to retreat. To answer this question, the team of researchers created a flexible model of the Columbia Glacier to reproduce different criteria such as ice thickness and terminus extent.
The scientists then compared thousands of outputs from the computer model under different assumptions with the wealth of data that exists for the Columbia Glacier.
The batch of outputs that most accurately reproduced the well-documented history of retreat was run into the future to predict the changes the Columbia Glacier will most likely experience until the year 2100. The researchers found that around 2020 the terminus of the glacier will retreat into water that is sufficiently shallow to provide a stable position through 2100 by slowing the rate of iceberg production.
The speediness of the glacier’s retreat is due to the unique nature of tidewater glaciers, Colgan said. When warming temperatures melt the surface of a land glacier, the land glacier only loses its mass by run-off. But in tidewater glaciers, the changes in ice thickness resulting from surface melt can create striking changes in ice flow, triggering an additional dynamic process for retreat.
The dynamic response of the Columbia Glacier to the surface melt will continue until the glacier reaches its new stable position in 2020, at roughly 26 miles long. “Once the dynamic trigger had been pulled, it probably wouldn’t have mattered too much what happened to the surface melt — it was just going to continue retreating through the bedrock depression upstream of the pre-1980s terminus,” Colgan said.
Colgan next plans to attempt to use similar models to predict when the Greenland glaciers — currently the major contributors to sea level rise — will “turn off” and complete their retreats.
The future for the Columbia Glacier, however, looks bleak. “I think the hope was that once we saw climate change happening, we could act to prevent some irreversible consequences,” Colgan said, “but now we are only about eight years out from this retreat finishing — it is really sad. There is virtually no chance of the Columbia Glacier recovering its pre-retreat dimensions on human time-scales.”
The study was funded by NASA, and co-authors on the paper include W. Tad Pfeffer of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Harihar Rajaram of the CU-Boulder Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, Waleed Abdalati of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration in Washington, D.C., and Balog of the Extreme Ice Survey in Boulder, Colo.
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