Monday Grab Bag: A rough start to Pac-12 play

It was a tough weekend for Buffs Basketball.  The men and women combined to kick-off their Pac-12 campaigns with a 0-4 record, leaving me in a less-than-stellar mood.  On the plus side, hockey is back.  That's a plus, right?

I'll be discussing all of the above in today's bag.

Click below for the bag...




Crash landing in Tempe - 

As if the heartbreak in Tucson wasn't pain enough, the Buffs followed up the loss to Arizona with a puzzling 65-56 letdown against ASU.  Not exactly the result Coach Boyle was looking for on his 50th birthday...

It all started out well enough, with the Buffs jumping out to a 17-4 lead before the second media timeout.  That fast start was slowly squandered, however, as an avalanche of soft interior play and missed shots proceeded to bury the Buffs.  ASU would take their first lead with 12 minutes to go in the second half, as the Buffs struggled to find any rhythm on offense.  CU finished 2-19 from three, and spent a large chunk of the second half (7:12) going scoreless as ASU extended their lead.

The big story was the play of ASU center Jordan Bachynski.  CU could do nothing with the 7-2 giant, who rejected nine shots to go along with his 16 points and seven rebounds. Fellow Sun Devil Carrick Felix also managed to confound the Buffs, notching 20/8.  Combined, the pair helped ASU control the paint, scaring the Buffs into taking poorly-timed jump shots and off-balance floaters.

Bachynski seemed to be lurking at every turn.  From: The BDC

I think the Buffs were hoping that a fast start would be enough to put down the Sun Devils.  Unfortunately, you can't win league games like that, and when ASU started to assert themselves, CU folded like a house of cards.  Add it all up, and the various CU scoring droughts combined for 18 minutes of gameplay.  I know Coach Boyle would love to win games based solely on the defense, but sometimes you just need to score the damn ball. The fact is, outside of the first 38 minutes in Tucson, the Buffs have had a hard time doing that on the road.

Part of the problem probably lies with how much CU depends on scoring from the free throw line.  The team is 5th in the nation in free throw attempts to field goal attempts, and end up scoring 23% (well above the national average) of their total points from the line.  Essentially, CU gets to the line a lot, and relies heavily on that production (despite being 258th nationally in FT%).  The problem is, on the road, you often don't get the benefit of the doubt on dribble-drive penetration, leaving the offense fighting on one leg.  Could the refs have blown a few more whistles CU's way last night?  Sure, but that's just not a reasoned expectation in a road game.  Sometimes you just have to hit shots.

Could you chalk this Tempe nightmare up to a hangover from the Arizona fiasco?  Sure, if you want to.  Energy certainly seemed to slack, but that's not the whole problem.  All road games are a problem right now, and it's up to the team to figure out how to bring the right mentality to 40 minutes of road hell.

Luckily, the friendly confines of the CEC await this weekend.  Hopefully the squad can rebound before a once promising season goes spinning out of control.


Women swept by NorCal duo - 

The #20 women's team fared equally as poorly this weekend, dropping a pair of home games to top-10 opponents Stanford and Cal.

The Stanford game isn't what's bugging me.  While CU could've kept things close by hitting their free throws, the Buffs were never going to win that game.  The Cal game, on the other hand, probably should've been a CU victory.

Jeffrey and the Buffs let one slip through their fingers.  From: CUBuffs.com

The Golden Bears missed 12 second half free throws, including six in the final 15 seconds, but were allowed to slink away with victory due to some atrocious rebounding by the Buffs.  As each missed free throw clanged off the rim, Cal would inevitably secure the offensive rebound, making any hope of a comeback laughable.

Don't get me wrong.  Both Cal and Stanford are top-tier teams, which in women's ball means they're mostly unbeatable by non-top-tier opponents, but the CU women let one slip away Sunday.  As a result, that ranking will disappear.


Hockey is back... or something - 

I was shocked when news reached me over the weekend that the NHL lockout was ending.  Mind you, I wasn't shocked that the lockout was ending, just that the news actually reached me.

Hockey had been experiencing the perfect storm of sport growth.  A slew of young stars had made it sexy, the Olympics of two years ago in hockey-mad Canada proved that it can drive ratings and passions, and resurgent franchises in major television markets (especially Chicago) had made it seem relevant.  Unfortunately, as Scott Burnside points out in this ESPN article, the NHL has thrown all of that away in a wave of greed and douchebaggery.

The painful truth is that the NHL has become expendable, the product of a decade's worth of neglect from the people who claim to love it.  Those sponsors attracted in recent years to the painfully slow buildup of national interest?  Gone.  Headway made in television distribution?  Gone.  The NHL didn't just hit the reset button, they mashed it with a sledgehammer.

There is no coming back.  The sporting world has passed the game by; barely anyone cares enough to even feign excitement at the end of the lockout.  Sure, the die-hard hockey fans will still love it, and pay for it, the same way they did before.  But any hope of escaping the niche fanbase cycle has been lost.

Hell, they couldn't even end the lockout at an opportune time, settling things during the first weekend of the NFL playoffs, when absolutely no one gives a shit about anything else.

The NHL?  Dead as a door nail, Smalls.


Happy Monday!