It wasn’t the defeat itself that was frustrating, though no doubt it was an opportunity missed against a potential Final Four team on the road.
For Colorado men’s basketball coach Tad Boyle, it was more about how the collapse went down on Saturday at UCLA, which on Monday moved up two spots to No. 5 in the latest AP top 25. The season-most 23 turnovers committed by CU against the Bruins, two days after recording a then-season-most 22 in a loss at USC, obscured a pair of defensive efforts that, for the most part, were good enough to beat quality opponents on the road.
Instead, the Buffs suffered just their second sweep of the two-game Los Angeles swing since joining the Pac-12 Conference. CU got back to work Monday hoping to get on track at home with a two-game series that begins Thursday against Washington (7 p.m., ESPNU).
“We’ve made great strides since the Cal debacle (on Dec. 31) defensively,” Boyle said. “We were really good against the Oregon schools at home. Defensively, in our half-court, we were really good against USC and UCLA. We held (UCLA) to less than 40%. So defensively, we’ve made some strides. I’m not saying we’ve arrived or we’re the greatest team in America by any means, but we have made incremental improvements defensively, without a doubt, the past two weeks.
“Where we have kind of fallen back is taking care of the basketball. It’s not that I’m disappointed in this team. But sometimes I feel like we’re plugging holes in the dike. And as soon as you get one sealed, another one pops open. Eventually you’ll get the dam built, and that’s what we’re in the process of doing.”
The Buffs held USC, which is shooting 46% on the season, to a 42.6% mark. The Trojans’ 25% showing from 3-point range (4-for-16) was well below their season percentage of 31.9%. It was more of the same against UCLA. Despite getting hot late when it mattered, the Bruins still posted their third-lowest field goal percentage of the season (38.1). The top 3-point shooting team going into Saturday’s game, the Bruins’ 21.1% performance (4-for-19) was their second-lowest of the season.
CU entered the road series in Los Angeles ranked 11th in the league in defensive 3-point percentage (33.1). The Buffs lowered that mark to 32.2 while jumping to seventh.
Of course, the glut of turnovers — it was the first time a Boyle-coached team at CU posted at least 22 in consecutive games — obscured those defensive efforts. Yet as wildly up-and-down as the 2022-23 season has unfolded so far, the Buffs still have an opportunity to make a push down the stretch. CU was at No. 60 in Monday’s NET rankings, and stood at No. 20 in adjusted defensive efficiency at KenPom.com.
Assuming the Buffs can find a way out of the turnover habit that has plagued them, particularly away from home, continuing that sort of defensive prowess could give CU something to lean on over the final 12 games of the regular season.
“We’ve taken steps forward on defense for sure, and that was a problem at the beginning of the year,” CU guard Julian Hammond III said. “Even though we lost these last two games, which obviously was disappointing, but we didn’t lose on the defensive end. We lost them rebounding and taking care of the ball. Turning over the ball that’s what killed us.”
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