As Colorado men’s basketball prepares for its Pac-12 Tournament matchup with Washington Wednesday, a couple of its players were honored Tuesday among the conference’s best.

Tristan da Silva and KJ Simpson were named to the all-Pac-12 first and second teams, respectively, the league announced Tuesday.

The all-conference teams and other awards are voted on by the league’s coaches.

A junior forward, da Silva was one of 10 players on the first team, earning the distinction after a decorated 2022-23 campaign. Over the regular season, da Silva averaged 15.9 points per game, tied for the team lead, while shooting 50.7% from the field and 40.2% from 3–point range. He’s the only Buffs player this season who shot better than 36% from behind the arc. da Silva is tied for sixth among all Pac-12 players in points per game and fifth in 3-point shooting.

​​”He's been shouldering a lot of responsibility for us, both offensively and defensively,” Colorado head coach Tad Boyle said. “The best thing about those awards is they're voted on by opposing coaches. You cannot vote for your own players. So when you're rewarded with a first team all conference honor, it means the other coaches have respect for you. There's no better feeling to me as a player that you can have than that.”

He becomes the eighth different Colorado player to make the all-Pac-12 first team. With da Silva being the latest, the Buffs have had at least one player make the cut in each of the past five seasons. da Silva’s older brother, Oscar, was a two-time first-team all-Pac-12 honoree at Stanford.

“It’s humbling for sure, but also a little uplifting,” da Silva said.

Simpson saw his role increase significantly as a sophomore, as his scoring average ballooned to 15.9 points per game, more than double what he recorded last season. He also led the team in assists (3.8 per game) and steals (1.5 per game). Compared to his in-conference peers, he’s tied for sixth in scoring, sixth in free-throw percentage (81.7%), sixth in steals, seventh in assists and 13th in assist-to-turnover ratio (1.5).

“It’s about progressing,” Boyle said of Simpson. “It’s about getting better. It's not about individual awards, but those are maybe confirmation of the fact that, yeah, you're doing something that the other people in the league recognize.”

Unlike the first team, the Pac-12 has only the traditional five players on its second team.

With da Silva and Simpson leading the way, Colorado finished the regular season 16-15 overall and 8-12 in the Pac-12, the latter of which marked the first time it finished conference play with a losing record in five years. It enters the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas as the event’s No. 9 seed and will face off against No. 8 seed Washington Wednesday at 1 p.m. MT.