Basketball: Oregon State @ Colorado

JackBeav:

Has anyone else noticed that we get the tougher of the two match-ups to start each and every weekend in league play thus far?

It doesn’t get any easier tonight. The Beavs get to face off in Boulder against a pretty good Buffs team. As many of you know, I thought Wake Forest’s stupidity two years ago was CU’s gain. Jeff Bzdelik is a horrible coach. Instead of CU fans griping about another pathetic season under him, they get a coaching star on the rise in Tad Boyle. And he has done wonders with his team in the short time he’s been there.

There will be little fooling the Buffs with the 1-3-1. They tore it to pieces last year in Boulder. And a whole game of it will likely result in the same. It will be effective when mixed with predominantly man and 2-3 sets. The Beavs defense looked a little renewed at the TTATT on Sunday. So it will be interesting to see what our boys can do against a team who takes care of the ball.

The Buffs are led by three seniors, Carlon Brown and Nate Tomlinson at G and Austin Dufault at F. Other than that, they are young with soph F Andre Roberson and frosh G Spencer Dinwiddie filling out the starting five and frosh G Askia Booker being the primary threat off the bench. They have three other bench players who will take about 10 minutes each. But they are not the primary focus.

Brown, Dufault, Roberson and Dinwiddie are the scoring threats along with Booker at the bench energy role. Tomlinson is the facilitator. And every one of them will launch the trey, with Dinwiddie and Roberson being the most likely offenders.

Their weaknesses are three-fold.

Outside of Roberson, the team is only good at rebounding when the guards get involved. But Roberson is a good one on the boards, and their guards will try to get involved. Since they like to run a pressure defense with a transition game, they play into the Beavs hands should they over-commit to the glass.

But they will likely need to over-commit, because they are very undersized. They play bigger than they are, but only one big routinely comes off the bench to spell two already smallish bigs. And their game takes a serious hit when their primary six are not running the court.

And other than Tomlinson and Dinwiddie, they’re susceptible to turnovers. Brown will dish as much as he drops. But they run such a frenetic pace that they make some interesting mistakes when pushed to the edge.

All in all, I think this should be one of the better games in the Pac this year. It should be on TV for pure entertainment value alone. We have two teams who like to take chances on defense and run it out when they can. I want to say the Beavs should win this game by winning the equalizer, the half-court set. But last year’s blow-out is still fresh in my memory.

This is a “prove it to me” game for the Beavs.

Until further notice…

Buffs 84 – Beavs 78

Angry:

I agree with JackBeav on this one–should be a wild game. Would just like to add that the win at Oregon was a step toward winning this type of game. That is, the Beavs finally closed an away game, and they may finally understand what it takes to win road games. They can't just show up, and now they know that. I expect a motivated team that is high energy from the get go. They'll be right in it, but will they play enough defense to win it? That's still the struggle.

From what I gathered, the game will not be televised, but it is available on Colorado's website (for a fee).