Face Top-Seed Cardinal Friday
Story by B.G. Brooks, Contributing Editor, CUBuffs.com
SEATTLE – College basketball in March is all about surviving and advancing – and the Colorado women’s team did both Thursday afternoon in the opening round of the Pac-12 Conference Tournament.
Overtaking UCLA with a 15-2 run midway through the second half, the Buffaloes defeated the Bruins 76-65 to reach the tournament quarterfinals for the third time since beginning Pac-12 competition in 2011.
But the assignment Friday at KeyArena (1 p.m. MT, Pac-12 Networks) is daunting: No. 9 seed CU (17-13) faces No. 1 seed Stanford (28-2). The Cardinal defeated the Buffs 87-77 on Jan. 12 in Boulder in their only regular-season meeting.

“I think we’re ready for them . . . it’s win or go home,” said CU senior guard Brittany Wilson. “So you lay it all on the floor, and we’re ready. We all have to come out and play 40 minutes. In the end, it’s about who plays 40 minutes the best.”
In defeating the Bruins (13-18) for the third time this season, Wilson and her twin sister, Ashley, gave the Buffs 55 quality minutes between them. The Wilson sisters combined for 33 points – 17 from Brittany, a career-high 16 from Ashley – to offset a game-high 23 points from UCLA sophomore Nirra Fields.
Lexy Kresl contributed 14 points off the bench for the Buffs – nine of them in the second half when they rallied from a 46-38 deficit. Kresl’s 3-pointer – the last of eight in 16 attempts for CU – gave the Buffs their largest lead of the game, 68-56, with 2:50 remaining. The Bruins never got closer than six points the rest of the way.
“I’m really excited for our team,” CU coach Linda Lappe said. “Any time you can win a game in postseason, it’s a plus.”
After a 29-29 halftime tie, the Bruins – despite being minus senior guard and No. 2 scorer Thea Lemberger (concussion) who was averaging 15.0 points – went on an 11-2 run and took their 46-38 lead. But Lappe and the Buffs adjusted defensively, nudging the Bruins out of their comfort zone and disrupting their offense.
Said Lappe: “They were really comfortable (offensively) to start the second half. Everybody was making shots, even players that don’t normally make shots. You could just see them start to get comfortable in what they were doing. I always think your defense has a huge part in that, and we wanted to try to make them uncomfortable, so we started to trap a little bit and tried to speed them up and make them do things they weren’t as comfortable doing, making them pass to players, making them pass over hands, and just increasing our aggressiveness.”

UCLA coach Cori Close agreed: “I thought they really got us out of rhythm in the second half . . . they got out and started denying passing lanes and trapped our first pass and really got us out of rhythm. We’re a team that needs to move the pieces around and hide certain mismatches and take advantage of other ones. They really made us play just a read-and-react type of situation, and it made it a guard game. We needed to attack off the dribble, and we didn’t have quite enough people that were confident in that kind of game.”
CU’s strategy worked. Of UCLA’s 13 turnovers, eight were committed in the second half. CU, meanwhile, cut its miscues from nine in the first half to four in the second. The Buffs outrebounded the Bruins 43-35 and held them to 38.8 percent shooting from the field (26-of-67). CU shot slightly better at 39.3 percent (24-of-61).
Lappe lauded her bench, which outscored the Bruins’ reserves 28-16, as being “fantastic . . . everybody did their job. Everybody knew their role. When we played together in that game, we were fantastic. When we moved the ball, when we played together defensively, hit the open player, and then we knocked down those open shots and everything seemed to go our way.”
The Wilson sisters accounted for four of CU’s eight 3-pointers, with Brittany hitting three of her six attempts and Ashley one of her two. The Buffs 50 percent performance from behind the arc, bolstered by four-of-six in the second half, followed a frigid 10 percent (3-of-30) from long range in the final three regular-season games. Thursday’s eight 3-pointers tie for the second most of the season.
“Me and coach watched film before we left (Boulder) , and one thing that she noticed about my shots was I was falling out of my shots,” Brittany Wilson said. “She said there is no reason I should be doing that on the three, and just stay in my shot, and that’s exactly what I did and they fell.”
If the Bruins were without Lemberger, the Buffs also were minus their No. 2 scorer – junior Jen Reese, who went down in the first half of the CU-UCLA meeting in Boulder with a broken bone in her shoulder. Ashley Wilson said the Buffs have adjusted well: “With any team, adversity is going to come. So it’s just about how you respond to adversity and how tough you’re willing to be and how much you’re willing to bounce back. We’ve done that all year long, no matter injuries or whatever. No team is going to feel sorry for you because you have injuries. You have to suit up and be ready to go the next day.”
Fields, a 5-9 sophomore, opened the scoring for UCLA and by the time the first half was over had collected 16 of the Bruins’ 29 points. The Buffs matched that total for a 29-29 halftime tie, but no CU player could manage over six points – the Wilson sisters had six each – in the first 20 minutes.
After Fields hit her jumper for the game’s first basket, the Buffs took control and rolled to a 17-10 advantage before the Bruins settled down. The teams traded baskets and the lead until the halftime buzzer ended play at 29-29. UCLA outscored CU 15-7 in the opening 6 minutes of the second half to take an eight-point (46-38) lead before the Buffs regrouped, went on their decisive run, tied the score at 46-46 on a 3-pointer from the right wing by Lauren Huggins and went ahead for good on a basket by Brittany Wilson.
After Kresl’s trey gave them their largest lead – 68-56 – the Buffs finished out their scoring at the free throw line. Their 20-of-24 performance included Kresl and Brittany Wilson each going four-for-four in the final 1:15 to keep UCLA at bay.
The Buffs move on, the Bruins go home. “We’re not ready to be done playing yet, and I think you can see how much intensity we played in the second half that we want to keep playing,” Lappe said. “I’m just excited for our entire team.”