Buffs bemoan slow start

By Tom Keegan     Mar 2, 2006

Fourteen minutes of basketball had been played in the sauna that was Allen Fieldhouse, and the scoreboard, which was not malfunctioning, showed that visiting Colorado, the highest-scoring team in the Big 12 Conference coming into the night, had scored four points.

Repeat: four points in 14 minutes.

As the building cooled down, Colorado heated up, then grew weary and lost, 75-54, Wednesday night to Kansas University.

“I looked up, and we had four points with seven minutes left,” Martane Freeman said. “I couldn’t believe it. Four points in 13 minutes.”

He could have looked up a minute later and seen the same number. Good thing for the psyches of Freeman and teammates that shooting totals aren’t shown on the scoreboard.

The Buffaloes had made one of 23 shots from the field before walk-on Scott Senger made a layup with 1:31 left in the half. At one point, Colorado missed 19 shots in a row.

“That’s when guys have to realize that when their shots aren’t going in, there are other ways to score, like crashing the boards and putting shots back in,” Freeman said. “We weren’t attacking. When your shots aren’t going down, you have to go into attack mode, and we didn’t.”

Colorado coach Ricardo Patton was in attack mode when he stormed all the way from his bench onto the court near KU’s bench to get into the face of an official after Freeman crashed onto the floor, sent there by KU’s Mario Chalmers, without a whistle.

Patton explained his reaction by saying he was “just trying to protect one of my players.”

He was slapped with a technical foul that seemed to change the momentum of calls that had been going the way of Kansas.

Freeman expressed no hard feelings toward Chalmers.

“I jumped up, and he was trying to box me out, and he took my legs out,” Freeman said. “It wasn’t anything dirty or anything like that, but he took my legs out.”

While blaming themselves for settling for jumpers, the Buffaloes also sent some credit the way of the KU defenders.

“As soon as you got past the guards, there was a big man there right away to help,” Freeman said. “They played great help defense.”

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