Bangot Dak readily admits he hasn’t yet played his best basketball.
He’s had plenty of company among his teammates, though.
The Colorado men’s basketball team got back to work on Tuesday with an undefeated mark through the first week of the season, but with plenty of work ahead if it hopes to maintain its winning ways.
Offensively, the Buffs have been A-plus through their 2-0 start, shooting well while limiting their turnovers. Defensively, an F might be generous, and it’s that end of the floor that held the focus of Tuesday’s practice, which head coach Tad Boyle estimated was “95% defense.”
CU doesn’t have much time to get that defense corrected, as a Providence team coached by former Boyle assistant Kim English brings a scoring average of 95.0 points through its first two games into a Friday night matchup at the CU Events Center (7 p.m., ESPN+).
“First off, I feel like it starts with me,” said Dak, the program’s longest-tenured player. “I’ve got to bring that intensity. I’ve got to bring the intangibles that I know I can bring to the team that’s going to help my teammates out a little bit easier. And just taking some pride. I feel like we’re not respecting our opponent as much. I feel like we’re guarding harder in practice than we are in the games. We’ve just got to take some more pride when we’re out here on the court.”
Providence opened the season with an 89-79 win against Holy Cross, then put up 101 points in a high-scoring overtime loss against Virginia Tech. The Friars haven’t quite shot the ball as well as the Buffs — Providence owned a .471 field goal percentage and a .305 mark on 3-pointer heading into its Tuesday game against Penn — but they’ve been equally generous on defense.
Each of CU’s two opponents have shot over 51% so far, with Montana State finishing with a .518 mark before Eastern Washington finished at .597. That latter number was the highest opposing shooting percentage in a CU win during Boyle’s 16-season tenure, and following that 102-97 overtime win, the Buffs’ head coach promised an arduous and revealing film session for his club.
Boyle said what the film revealed was a Buffs team that can’t hang its hat on anything defensively at this point.
“My whole thing was this — it’s not about yelling and screaming and calling guys out. To me, what we have to do as coaches is, we have to teach,” Boyle said. “I went into that film session and we watched probably 85% of our defensive clips and looked at where are we breaking down. And what do we need to get better at. Let’s let the film teach us, because the film doesn’t lie.
“I just approach that as a teaching moment. And the biggest thing that came out of that film is we let the ball go wherever it wants to go. When you play against teams that run an offense, and run set plays and they want to get the ball to the player that they want to get to in the spot they want to get it, and we let that happen, we’re gonna have problems. There’s no disruptiveness when it comes to our defense.”
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