Colorado at Pilots Saturday 12/3 7:00PM

Location: Chiles Center
Radio: 910 ESPN with Jason Swygard
Video: campusinsiders.com

Colorado is 5-2. Their best win is a 68-54 victory over Texas, in a tourney. They've lost to Notre Dame (same tourney) and to Colorado St. CSU is 126 KenPom, very close to UP. They are balanced, with 10 players averaging over 10 minutes per game and playing in most or all games. No one is averaging more than 15 ppg. The 5 key players are all good size, with 4 between 6'5" and 6'7", and a 6'9" big man. They all rebound well.

They have some very tough games coming up before the Pac-12 conference starts, including Xavier and @BYU. They will be very motivated to win this one. Looking for the Pilots to give them a good game.

PilotRam, what else should we know about the Buffs? Perhaps they'll be distracted if their football team beats UW tonight.

This will be CU's first true road game...their only games outside their own arena were the games against Texas and Notre Dame at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

CSU beat CU by playing "ugly" and physical....something that UP will not do, as it is just not in the Pilots' DNA to do so.

The Buffs are only favored by 3, but if the Pilots are to win this game they must control the defensive boards and not let CU get second chance points.

I think we can look for CU to employ a smothering defense again this year....as many will recall, in last year's 85-63 loss in Boulder, Alec was limited to only 1 field goal and had 5 turnovers with 8 assists. The only player in double figures was D'Marques with 12 points, all on three pointers.

Somehow I don't think they'll be distracted by some silly football game....regardless of the outcome.

UP Athletics wrote: PROMOTIONS
Saturday night will have a Comic-Superhero theme for students and kids. The first 1,000 students and kids through the gates will receive a custom-made Pilots cape as a giveaway item. Portland has also partnered with the KGW Great Toy Drive for the game. Fans that bring an unwrapped toy to donate will receive free admission.  

Hey, how come PN members don't have super-hero capes?

Opportunity is knocking....Pilots up two at the half, haven't played nearly up to capabilities either.

One of these teams is going to be less bad in the second half, let's hope it's the Pilots!

CU was recently receiving votes (before losing at home to CSU). Would be a great win for the Pilots!

I would like to personally thank the refs for doing a great job at creating a terrible basketball game that frustrated fans and confused players. I watched the Duke Mich St game and thought they called it like a wrestling match, which made for great basketball. That they called it like it was a thumb war tonight - made for terrible basketball.

The bad calls were evenly distributed, within reason. But it was clear foul trouble disrupted our rotation given the short bench we have - CU could weather it with a longer bench. We also didn't really know how to play with each other in different combinations than we've had on the floor this season. Just got us really out of sync. I think one killer stretch was the end of the first half when we went small ball and literally could not get a rebound. I liked the concept, but guys like guards gotta step up the rebounding effort if we're going to got that route. Frustrating loss because it could have gone differently but just got sideways on us. Initial thoughts.

Well whoops. We missed a big opportunity there. Colorado was not impressive, but the Pilots were even less so tonight. The team looked totally out of whack. Wintering and Johnson are over-playing. Trying to do too much, resulting in some bad shots and way too many turnovers. Taylor's shot was abysmal. Tyson stepped up, but no one else did.

The defense played well enough to win, but offense had it's worst performance of the year. And it wasn't because Colorado played particularly good defense.

DoubleDipper wrote:The Buffs are only favored by 3, but if the Pilots are to win this game they must control the defensive boards and not let CU get second chance points.

CU pulled down 14 offensive boards resulting in 22 second chance points, but not because the Pilots played badly, because the Buff players are just bigger and stronger and they have a deeper bench.

Jazz and Alec again played 40 minute games and looked pretty good for the most part, but this is now the second game in a row that Gabe has struggled on offense (3-13 & 0-5 from behind the arc).

As rusty as Chier might be, and as inexperienced as he may be at playing TEAM basketball, he's got to at least give UP some shooting and athleticism off the bench beginning in two weeks.

Rochin54 wrote:I The bad calls were evenly distributed, within reason.  

In the first half...this seemed true. In the second half it seemed less true. I wouldn't say we got jobbed, but I'd say the types of calls were not distributed evenly in the second half. Bad reffing all game. Lots of ticky tack calls the first half, but it seemed to be consistently so and both ways. The second half the refs called a completely different type of game, deciding not to call ticky tack things for the most part and it seemed they were still calling a few ticky tack fouls on us, but not on CU. And there were a few rather egregious CU fouls they didn't call at all IMO.

Rochin54 wrote:I would like to personally thank the refs for doing a great job at creating a terrible basketball game that frustrated fans and confused players.  I watched the Duke Mich St game and thought they called it like a wrestling match, which made for great basketball.  That they called it like it was a thumb war tonight - made for terrible basketball.

The bad calls were evenly distributed, within reason.  But it was clear foul trouble disrupted our rotation given the short bench we have - CU could weather it with a longer bench.  We also didn't really know how to play with each other in different combinations than we've had on the floor this season.  Just got us really out of sync.  I think one killer stretch was the end of the first half when we went small ball and literally could not get a rebound.  I liked the concept, but guys like guards gotta step up the rebounding effort if we're going to got that route.  Frustrating loss because it could have gone differently but just got sideways on us.  Initial thoughts.

These tightly called games are going to be tough for us. We just don't have a lot of depth at the 4 and 5. What surprised me was that when it was clear at the end of the first half that super small ball (we had no 4 or 5 on the court) wasn't working, Porter didn't at least give Smoyer a run. He couldn't have done any worse.

Our bigs need to figure out a way to stay out of foul trouble. There were a couple really dumb fouls!

blacksheep wrote:What surprised me was that when it was clear at the end of the first half that super small ball (we had no 4 or 5 on the court) wasn't working, Porter didn't at least give Smoyer a run.  He couldn't have done any worse.

I was going to post something like this. Second-chance points were 22-7 Colorado, that's the ball game right there.

Three straight games where Smoyer hasn't even got off the bench. Maybe he's hurt?

Rochin54 wrote:I would like to personally thank the refs for doing a great job at creating a terrible basketball game that frustrated fans and confused players.

The gentleman who "officially" evaluates the refs for the WCC (not unofficially like the rest of us) was at Saturday's game, if he's at the Chiles Center tonight I'll make a point of asking him about the apparent lack of consistency in calling the game.

When the evaluator is at a game, he will sit down with the refs at half time to go over their performance from the first half and offer suggestions for improvement....this may be why we saw a much different ref performance in the first 10 minutes or so of the second half.