BOULDER — As the Colorado men’s basketball team fades in the west, reality is trumping wishful thinking.
First-year coach Tad Boyle did an admirable job of selling the implausible idea that a team can win consistently in one of the nation’s top basketball conferences with neither size nor depth.
For a little while, the Buffaloes actually made it look possible. Through their first three conference games, not only were they 3-0, they had outrebounded all three opponents with a team that doesn’t have a single healthy, capable big man.
“It’s really a challenge,” Boyle admitted Wednesday, a couple of hours before a heart-wrenching overtime loss to Texas A&M that all but doomed CU’s chance to go to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2003.
“Our tallest guy’s 6-8. We’re undersized every night we step out. A&M brings in three guys off the bench that are bigger than our starting center.”
Not to mention the fact that CU’s starting “center,” Austin Dufault, is actually a finesse forward who averages fewer than five rebounds a game.
Boyle’s plan was to compensate for his lack of size with speed, trying to replicate what Doug Moe did with the Nuggets in the 1980s — dominate at high altitude by running opponents out of the gym.
“I’ve never put myself in the category of Doug Moe, because he’s a Hall of Fame coach, but I do think he had it figured out in Denver, the way that they wanted to play,” Boyle said. “That’s why they were so good at home.”
Actually, Moe is not in the Hall, nor is he likely to be, given traditionalists’ disdain for his free-form offense. But Moe knew something that Boyle claims not to believe — if you want to run, you need big men to rebound your opponent’s misses and launch the transition game.
They don’t have to be particularly good big men. In fact, Moe specialized in big stiffs like Danny Schayes and Blair Rasmussen. But they were 7-footers who could do two things: hit the medium-range jumper and rebound.
Boyle insists size is overrated when it comes to rebounding.
“If you look at those first three games, we rebounded,” he pointed out. “We outrebounded our opponents by an average of 12.7 boards in those three games.”
True enough, but winning the battle of the boards with guards and small forwards, as the Buffs did against Missouri, Kansas State and Oklahoma State, requires tremendous energy. Which is where depth comes in. Unfortunately, the Buffs don’t have that either.
“Cory’s a good example,” Boyle said of senior guard Cory Higgins. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at the stat sheet after games and I’m like, ‘Man, I played him too much.’ To play at the pace we want to play, at the intensity we want to play, it’s hard for a guy to play 37 minutes a game. He needs to be playing 29-30 at the pace we want him to play, and then we’re bringing in another guy and we’re coming in waves. That’s when you can really see the effects of speed.”
Higgins’ senior season might have been a different story had center Shane Harris-Tunks, the only capable big man on the roster, not torn his ACL back in October. In his absence, the Buffs’ leading rebounder has been willowy 6-foot-7 freshman forward Andre Roberson.
With neither size nor depth, Boyle’s best players are all guards. And he plays the four of them — Higgins, Alec Burks, Marcus Relphorde and Levi Knutson — virtually the entire game. And so perhaps it was not coincidental that against the Aggies on Wednesday night, his team shot .478 from the floor in the first half, .370 in the second and .250 in overtime.
Opponents have figured out that if they hit the offensive glass, CU can’t run out on them. The Aggies had 15 offensive boards. And if they pack it in at the defensive end, it’s harder for Burks and Higgins to slash to the basket, which is their specialty.
For all of that, they would have beaten the Aggies but for a defensive lapse — a miscommunication on a switch — with two seconds remaining in regulation. That’s how close Boyle’s unconventional strategy came to beating a ranked team for the third time this season.
Good recruiting can solve these problems, but it will be too late for Higgins, and possibly for Burks, depending upon when the Buffs’ best player elects to declare for the NBA draft.
This is Jeff Bzdelik’s legacy, and for now, Boyle has to live with it. Bzdelik recruited two wonderful wing players in Burks and Higgins — and very little else. Boyle’s job now is to fill in all those blanks.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
