Roy Williams has seen the replay.
His opinion stands.
“Nick Collison is a good, solid, clean basketball player and I’ve got a great problem if anybody wants to say otherwise,” Williams said Tuesday.
Kansas’ coach was speaking after studying tape of Collison’s intentional foul on Jose Winston in the second half of KU’s 85-75 men’s basketball victory over Colorado on Monday in Boulder, Colo.
Williams said after the game he was certain Collison wouldn’t take a cheap shot on an opposing player, though he hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the play to issue a definitive opinion.
“I think it was a clean play. I don’t think there was anything dirty about it at all. I didn’t think there was anything cheap about it at all. Somebody that says that or implies that is wrong that’s the bottom line,” Williams said.
CU point guard Winston plucked a steal and raced in for a layup, Collison coming from behind, going for the ball and hammering him in the process. The 5-foot-11, 180-pound Winston flew out of bounds and banged his head on the floor and needed to be helped off the court.
“The foul I thought was very cheap and flagrant,” CU coach Ricardo Patton said.
ESPN’s announcers thought the foul was a hard foul, not a cheap foul by the 6-9, 250-pound Collison.
“Our youngster clearly made a play on the ball. Was it a hard foul? Yes,” Williams said. “I even told the official, ‘I think I’ve got a little bit of a complaint why you would call it an intentional foul.
KU coach Roy Williams
“The official said, ‘Roy, it was so hard I have the right to call a hard foul an intentional foul.’ I do think the referee has that right. I said, ‘We’ve got enough problems without me going crazy so I’ll live with it.’
“Looking at it on tape, I still think I could possibly have a legitimate complaint. It maybe should not have been called an intentional foul because of how hard it was.”
Williams hopes the issue will die now.
“I did not want any one of our players to ever hurt anybody and Nick Collison is not that kind of player,” Williams said. “I think it’ll end there. I don’t think that our players will get that reputation (of being dirty) because when you look at it on tape, the bad thing is the kid got his legs tangled, came down, hit the floor and his head snapped back.
“You can have that happen when you are drawing a charge. You can have that happen a lot of different ways. I felt badly for Jose,” Williams continued.
Patton said after the contest Winston might have suffered a concussion.
“(Yet) two minutes later he was back in the ballgame,” Williams said. “I don’t think they’d put him back in the game if they truly felt he had a concussion. Jose is a tough tough youngster and very good defender.”
Duo late for last Saturday’s meal
Mario Kinsey did not play at Colorado after playing just two minutes against Texas A&M. It made a caller to Roy Williams’ Hawk Talk radio show wonder if the freshman point guard was in the coach’s doghouse.
“It’s no big deal. Two games ago Mario and Bryant (Nash) were eight minutes late to pre-game meal,” Williams said, referring to last Saturday’s KU-Texas A&M game. “I knew they wouldn’t play the first half and probably not the second half. I did put them in at the end.”
At Colorado?
“I felt comfortable with what Jeff (Boschee) and Kirk (Hinrich) were doing and there was no foul trouble,” Williams said, noting it was merely a coach’s decision to not play Kinsey.
Nash played four minutes against A&M and two minutes at Colorado.
Jeff Boschee, who hit five threes on Monday, re-aggravated a right thumb injury in the game.
“I sprained it this fall in pick-up games,” Boschee said. “I re-aggravated it tonight. It’s nothing big.”
He chuckled when told he could have used a sore thumb as an excuse for a recent slump that had him hitting 8 of 43 threes over nine games.
“It’s no big deal,” said Boschee, who has hit 15 of 28 threes over the last four games.
Sitting in the stands with his wife, right behind KU’s bench, Raef LaFrentz had a splendid time at the KU-CU game.
“I had faith in my boys,” ex-Jayhawk LaFrentz said. “I knew they’d pull it out. Anytime you go on the road in the Big 12, it’s tough. Road games are always tough, especially up here in the altitude.”
LaFrentz, a third-year forward with the Denver Nuggets, misses his college days.
“The NBA is designed for entertainment. So much more is going on besides basketball,” LaFrentz said. “In college, you see everybody playing hard with no politics involved.
“The good thing is you get paid more than you did in college,” he quipped.
LaFrentz was in the news in mid-December when the Nugget players skipped a practice in a show of support for LaFrentz, who faced constant criticism from coach Dan Issel.
“It was a mess,” LaFrentz said. “We as players for whatever reason decided to not go to practice one day. We were never going to boycott or anything like that. I think too much was made out of it. The good thing is since then we’ve been playing great basketball.
“It’s part of coaching,” he said of Issel riding him hard. “I feel I’m a coachable player. There are areas where you must draw the line as a man. But like I said, things have been great since then.”
The Nuggets entered play Tuesday with a 24-17 record.