City of Basketball Love

Varun Kumar (@vrkumar8)
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The makeup of Team Colorado is unlike that of the other alumni teams at TBT.

All of them have guys who largely played together, even if for a season, or played for the same head coach. The college careers of the Colorado players span about eight seasons--and three different head coaches.

“I never got to play with guys like Marcus [Hall] and Dominique [Coleman],” said former Buffaloes forward Austin Dufault, who graduated from the school in Boulder in 2012. “We always used to sit around and talk like ‘what would it have been like if we got to play together,’ and something like this you get to find out.”

Now that the what if’s have turned into reality, the Colorado alums are just two wins away from capturing TBT’s elusive title and of course, the $2 million prize.

The alumni teams from both Colorado and Utah met on Saturday in the third quarterfinal game at The Basketball Tournament, with Team Colorado advancing to the semifinals after a hard-fought 83-78 win.

Colorado and Utah played on-and-off in basketball before they both joined the Pac 12 Conference in 2011. As a result, most of the players on both sides never got to fully experience the intense rivalry that it has become between the two mountain state schools.

The game between the alumni teams hardly resembled the physical, low-scoring games from the past few seasons between the Utes and Buffaloes. The matchup was instead a higher-scoring, back-and-forth contest and no team led by more than one possession for almost the entire second half.

Marcus Hall’s floater in the lane ultimately proved to be the dagger for Team Colorado, giving them an 81-76 lead with just 26.2 seconds to go. Hall finished with a game-high 22 points, to go along with his six rebounds and four assists on the night.

“We knew what they were capable of,” Hall said after the game. “We knew that if we could keep it close, if we execute in the last few minutes, we could win the game.”

Even after such a big win, they are still maintaining their one game at a time attitude and not focused on any of the potential benefits that come with winning the title. They’re just, in Hall’s words, just soaking it all in, and living in the moment as they survive and advance.

“We just wanted to be on the big stage, and that’s where we’re at now. It’s an opportunity to represent our school, again, at a high level, on national TV,” said Hall, who left as a senior in 2008 as a 1000 point scorer.

Most of the players wore the Buffs uniform during a relatively down time for the program, with no NCAA Tournament appearances and two NIT berths from 2004-2011. Save for a run to the NIT semis in 2011, TBT represents many of their players’ first opportunity to make a deep run in a national tournament in the US.

“For me, and I know it has been for these guys too, it has been fun. That’s what’s keeping us going,” Hall said.

“We came here to see each other and bond like we did four years ago, or eight years ago,” he continued. “And I think that’s what’s helping us on the court.”

Despite being down by as much 13 midway through the first, they did not panic, staying relaxed as they slowly came back to tie the game within the first few minutes of the first half.

Coleman, who played for Ricardo Patton’s last two teams in Boulder in 2005-06 and 2006-07, noted that their trust and comfort level with each other was a big reason for the comeback.

“We stayed composed. We all know what the next person is saying, whether its Hall, or [Marcus] Relaphorde. We know what everyone says isn’t for the bad, it’s for the good,” Coleman said. “The whole thing is for one goal. It’s to win. We’re all in this together. For all the Colorado alumni--future or past-- it’s one unit here.”

Ex-Buffaloes Hall, Dufault (17 points), Coleman (16) and Relaphorde (14) caught fire early in the second half from deep to get their team back into the game.

Each player finished three 3-pointers in the game.

Colorado’s comeback effort was also spearheaded by their terrific perimeter defense, keeping Team Utah out of the lane and holding them to 33.3 percent shooting from deep, compared to 53.8 percent in the first.

“That was on our game plan defensively,” Coleman said. “From the get go, we had to guard the three, make them shoot contested threes. In the first half they hit them. We knew that if we hit contested threes, we would be able to get back into the game.”