So this is how it ends. This is how Colorado wakes up from its nightmare. Askia Booker, the best four-year player the Buffs have ever had, played the last game of his college career Thursday night in the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas. His swan song? A 93-85 loss to the Oregon Ducks in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 Tournament. Perhaps the real nightmare will be the eight months that the Buffs have to brood over the most hellish season in their recent memory. Either way, it’s over.
Junior forward Josh Scott throws down a dunk in the first half. (Matt Sisneros/CU Independent)
Askia Booker played 134 games for Colorado, and he gave two kinds of performances. Each game, he exploded with kinetic energy and emotion, gunning the Buffs to either victory or an ugly loss, shot selection be damned. Booker always played to one extreme: brilliant or frustrating. Colorado may never see another player like him. The next time his No. 0 jersey will be in the Coors Events Center is when the Buffs raise it into the rafters to hang beside Chauncey Billups and Scott Wedman.
“Over the course of time, when you look back 15, 20 years from now, you’re going to say Askia Booker was the part of some really good teams and part of the resurgence of Colorado basketball,” Buffs head coach Tad Boyle said.
Booker’s final game would have been one of the frustrating ones, had it not felt more like a funeral than a basketball game. He scored 12 points, dished five assists and pulled in five rebounds. He shot 4-of-14 from the field, 2-of-9 from deep, attempted only two free throws and didn’t score in the first half. His counterpart, Oregon’s Joseph Young, scored 30.
Oregon guard Joseph Young throws down a breakaway dunk on his way to a 30 point performance. (Matt Sisneros/CU Independent)
It didn’t have to end the way that it did. At first, the Buffs beat the Ducks at their own game — Colorado pushed the ball aggressively early on, and got it inside before Oregon could set up its zone. The Buffs scored from the paint with ease; the Ducks’ bigs were too small to stop the trio of Josh Scott, Wes Gordon and Dustin Thomas, who combined to start 7-of-7.
Colorado scored the game’s first seven points and led for much of the first half. The Buffs assisted on four of their first six buckets; they picked Oregon’s zone apart with their passing and bullied it with their size. They forced the Ducks to miss their first eight three-point shots, and Young, the Pac-12 player of the year, shot only 3-of-10 in the first half.
But the Ducks came out with a full-court press after coach Dana Altman’s first timeout. They immediately forced two turnovers that led to easy dunks, and Colorado couldn’t box out their bigs on the offensive glass. The Buffs maintained their lead because Young and guard Jalil Abdul-Bassit combined to start 5-of-16, but the cracks were there — the turnovers, Oregon’s offensive rebounds, and Colorado’s tepid 2-of-9 start from deep. Then the Ducks heated up. Young and Abdul-Bassit drained back-to-back threes off of — what else — Buff turnovers to tie the game, and it took an emphatic putback by Jaron Hopkins to give Colorado a 37-34 lead at the break.
“We just wanted to come out with a whole lot of energy, and that’s what we did from the start,” freshman guard Dominique Collier said. “And we talked about it the whole year, how we couldn’t put together two, so we just have to learn to put together two halves, and we didn’t do that.”
Nothing could have prepared Colorado for the second-half deluge that washed away their season. The Buffs and Ducks traded buckets for four minutes. Booker got on the board with a layup. Then it was over before Colorado blinked. Young got a steal and transition dunk to break a 46-46 tie. Oregon forward Dwayne Benjamin stole the following inbounds pass and threw it down. Then it got worse. The Ducks went on a 21-3 run, making 18 of their first 21 shots in the second half. Young was unstoppable. He bombed threes off the dribble and got to the rim at will. He scored 22 of his 30 points after the break. When it wasn’t Young, it was forward Elgin Cook. He scored 11 points on 5-of-5 shooting in the half.
“I thought offensively we kind of let them go on that run by not taking care of the basketball,” Boyle said. “So turnovers were a part of that run, them making some tough shots. They made open shots when they had open shots.”
The Buffs trailed by as many as 18, though they had one last fight in them — they cut Oregon’s lead to 4 with a minute and a half to go. Booker’s last pull-up three rimmed out, and Colorado’s season went with it. The Buffs fouled to the end, anything to extend the game for a few precious seconds. There were exactly 19.6 seconds left when Booker committed his fifth foul and walked off the court for the final time to a standing ovation and into the arms of his teammates and coaches.
Then it was over. There was no time to linger because, as soon as the final buzzer sounded, Stanford and Utah were on the floor to shoot around for the nightcap of the second day of the Pac-12 Tournament. Like a band-aid being ripped off a wound, Askia Booker and his four years of brilliance and frustration walked off the court for the last time.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Tommy Wood at thomas.c.wood@colorado.edu. Follow him on Twitter @woodstein72.
