Saturday, the Buffs had a chance to bookend their time in the Pac-12 with a pair of titles. After winning the league tournament in their first season in 2012, they had an opportunity to lift the conference’s final crown in 2024. They also had a chance to eliminate any doubt about an NCAA Tournament bid, which they had worked so hard to secure over the past month.
Unfortunately, they fell just one game short.
To cap off an unprecedented weekend of bid-stealing, Oregon punched its ticket to the big dance with a 75-68 win over Colorado in the title game in Las Vegas. This marks the Ducks’ fourth Pac-12 Tournament title since the league expanded to 12 teams in 2012. They will now hear their name called on Selection Sunday after coming into the week needing a championship to sneak into the 68-team field.
“Number one, I’m proud of our guys, I’m proud of our team. I’m proud of what they’ve done over the last four, four and a half weeks,” head coach Tad Boyle said postgame. “We’re not gonna let this one game define us, because what these guys have done over that period of time is nothing short of amazing in my opinion. We’ve really come together, we’ve played well, well enough to win. Unfortunately, tonight we didn’t. Oregon had a lot to do with that. ... Oregon played better than us tonight. They deserved to win, we didn’t. We had our chances, we just didn’t play well enough.”
As for the Buffs (24-10), they will await the bracket reveal Sunday evening to see if they made the cut. Their win Friday in the semifinals seemed to secure their spot, but with results around the country on top of the Ducks’ win, the bubble has shrunk by up to five spots and has left a lot of doubt in plenty of teams’ minds heading into Sunday.
“There’s no doubt in my mind this is an NCAA Tournament team,” Boyle said. “I’ve known that from day one. We’ve had some hiccups along the way, we’ve had some injuries along the way, and hopefully they’ll look at the whole body of work and recognize that we’re one of the best – what is it, 37 at-large teams? I can’t think of 36, 37 that are better than us, but that’s for them to decide, not for me to decide.”
As for the game itself, it was a nervy start from both teams, with both struggling to execute offensively in the early going. For the Buffs, turnover problems continued to get in their way. They started the game with three early ones, as their offense was sped up and discombobulated in the early going.
On the Oregon side, the Ducks (23-11) weren’t attacking nearly enough and settled for jumper after jumper. After stellar performances from guards Jackson Shelstad and Jermaine Couisnard in their semifinal upset of Arizona, the two were cold from the outside Saturday, leaving the Ducks looking for different answers.
There wasn’t much separating the two squads in the opening 20 minutes, as the Buffs’ only run to stretch their lead out to nine was quickly answered by a spurt from the Ducks to get back to level ground. Shelstad finally started to get going, scoring four points in the final minute of the first half to give the Ducks a 33-30 lead going into the break.
The X-factor in the second half was simple: N’Faly Dante was the best player on the court. After struggling with foul trouble early on in the game, Dante was everywhere in the second half, completely controlling the game on both ends of the floor in a superhuman performance. The Ducks’ big man set great screens to free up his guards, consistently made strong catches and finishes around the basket, controlled the boards and patrolled the paint on the defensive end, altering every pass or shot that came near him.
“I thought N’Faly Dante was the difference in the game,” Boyle said. “Even when we played them in Eugene, he was 10 for 10 from the field, he was 12 for 12 Saturday night. By my math, that’s 22 for 22, and we were trying to double him tonight, and he scored out of double teams. He played extremely well. He changed shots at the rim defensively. ... I thought N’Faly Dante was a beast tonight.”
On the other end, KJ Simpson came alive after halftime, buoying an exhausted Colorado squad coming off of a grueling win the night before and playing with little depth. The Buffs were missing Julian Hammond due to a knee injury, and Cody Williams has been coming off the bench and playing limited minutes after returning from an ankle sprain, so the Buffs needed their star to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the second half. He did just that.
After a Simpson 3-pointer tied the game early in the second half, Dante responded with back-to-back buckets to put the Ducks back in front. Then, with the two teams going back and forth, Dante picked off an errant Simpson pass and finished it off with a second-chance bucket on the other end. At the 8-minute mark, Simpson gave the Buffs the lead with a pull-up, but Dante reclaimed it with yet another offensive board and strong finish.
As the clock ticked past the 5-minute mark and the game entered crunch time, Luke O’Brien, starting in place of Williams this week, knocked down a 3 to give Colorado a 62-61 lead. Unfortunately, that was the last lead they would ever sniff. Dante continued his dominance, throwing down an emphatic dunk off of a Colorado defensive breakdown and following it up with yet another second chance bucket, stamping a 10-2 Oregon run that gave them their first real separation of the game with a minute to play.
Then, the senior center was ready to put the exclamation point on his championship performance. With the Ducks leading by six and the clock ticking inside 40 seconds, Simpson pulled a desperation 3 to try and cut the deficit in half. Dante was right there, leaping up to swat it away before flying towards the scorer’s table to save the ball to Shelstad, who was fouled and put the game away at the line.
The Oregon big man stuffed the stat sheet: 25 points on a perfect 12-for-12 shooting, nine rebounds, three steals and that decisive block at the end of the game, plus many more altered shots around the rim. He willed the Ducks to victory in the second half. Shelstad and Couisnard added 17 and 14 points, respectively, despite inefficient shooting nights from both.
The turnovers were a major story in Saturday's game, as Oregon gave the ball away just three times while taking it away from the Buffs 13 times and turned those into 23 points. Both of the Oregon guards were named to the all-tournament team, and Dante was the most outstanding player.
“Turnovers — not necessarily turnovers but the turnover margin — we were dead last in the Pac-12 in that,” Boyle said. “Tonight, that cost us the game. Because we had 13 turnovers and they had three. That’s 10 extra possessions that Oregon has that we don’t, and that’s the difference in a close game like this.”
Simpson finished with 23 points, six rebounds and four assists. He scored 16 in the second half and came up with a bucket nearly every time CU needed, but a couple of costly turnovers down the stretch hurt his team’s chances. O’Brien was the only other Buff in double figures with 11. Simpson was named to the all-tournament team alongside Tristan da Silva, who had a rough shooting night on his way to nine points in the title game.
Now, the wait begins for Colorado. Its bid seemed safe 24 hours ago, but since then there have been confirmed bid thieves in the A-10 (VCU or Duquesne), the AAC (UAB or Temple), the Mountain West (New Mexico), the ACC (NC State), and the Pac-12 with the Ducks. The entire bubble slides down accordingly, bringing Colorado closer to the cut line than many thought it might be coming into the day. The Buffs will find out their fate when the bracket is revealed at 4 p.m. MST on CBS.
