The first two road performances in the Big 12 couldn’t have been more disparate for the Colorado men’s basketball team.
Different, yet still the same.
Against Arizona State last week, the Buffaloes opened slowly and never truly warmed up during an uninspired showing. Against Central Florida on Wednesday, the Buffs put up impressive numbers pretty much across the board with one glaring exception.
Still, CU returned home without wins each time.
It’s a trend the Buffs will be challenged to reverse as they return to the CU Events Center for a date against No. 21 West Virginia on Sunday (1 p.m. MT, ESPN+). After sloughing through a sluggish loss at Arizona State, CU actually played well at both ends of the floor at UCF, but the effort was undone by 22 turnovers.
The Knights turned those giveaways into 24 extra points. It was CU’s highest turnover total since committing 22 and 23 at USC and UCLA, respectively, two years ago.
“I think each individual player on the team has to become more prideful of that part of the stat sheet,” CU head coach Tad Boyle said. “Whether it’s completing passes, footwork and traveling, not leaving your feet to pass the ball — which you can’t do in this league, especially if you’re a guard. It’s just being strong with the ball.
“The thing about the teams in this league — Iowa State, Arizona State, Central Florida, 3-for-3 now — they are very active with their hands in terms of reaching, poking at the ball. And sometimes they’ll hit a wrist, they’ll hit a hand, they’ll hit a forearm. And we’ve got to be strong enough to deal with that. And right now, we’re not. So that’s where we have to get better.”
It wasn’t CU’s first high-turnover game of the season. Those nights typically have been team efforts, and the same can be said about Wednesday’s performance. Yet the loss at UCF was the first time the primary turnover culprit was CU’s starting backcourt of Julian Hammond III (five turnovers) and RJ Smith (six).
During a critical stretch midway through the second half, the Buffs committed seven turnovers while watching UCF wipe out a 10-point CU lead with a 12-0 run. Those seven turnovers occurred in a span of 4 minutes, 41 seconds, and Smith, who entered the game with a solid assist-to-turnover rate of 1.83, was charged with four of them.
The defeat left the Buffs with an 0-3 start in the rugged Big 12. It’s only the second time in 15 seasons under Boyle the Buffs have begun a league slate with three consecutive losses. CU still has a ways to go to match the Derrick White-led club of 2016-17, which started the Pac-12 schedule 0-7. Yet given the various ways the Buffs have managed to lose games thus far, combined with the quality of teams on the Big 12 slate, it’s not too soon to put the Buffs on watch for approaching the ’16-17 team’s mark.
After hosting the 21st-ranked Mountaineers, CU hosts Cincinnati, which dropped out of the top 25 this week, before embarking on another winnable road trip at Oklahoma State.
“At the end of the day, the effort doesn’t matter if you’re not winning games,” Hammond said after Wednesday’s defeat. “We’re 0-3. So we’ve got to come into that next game with a mentality that we’re 0-3 and we have to win. You don’t want to say any game is a must-win, but when you start that bad in the league you’ve got to start climbing up. We need to win these next few games, especially at home, no matter who the opponent is.”
Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.