LAS VEGAS — The Colorado men’s basketball team has nothing to do for a few days except wait and cross its collective fingers that the 2022-23 season isn’t quite over.
Among the Buffaloes, that waiting game might be a little more nerve-racking for Jalen Gabbidon and Ethan Wright.
While everyone else on CU’s roster has more basketball games ahead of them whether or not the Buffs receive an NIT bid on Sunday, Wright and Gabbidon, the Buffs’ graduate transfers out of the Ivy League, are two players left to wonder if they have played their final games.
The NIT selection show will be held on Sunday (8 p.m. MT, ESPNU) after the NCAA Tournament selection show, with first-round games scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday at campus sites.
“I’m really proud of the way we fought,” Wright said of CU’s run at the Pac-12 tournament, which ended with a quarterfinal loss against No. 2 UCLA on Thursday. “We really came together. We were undermanned and there was no quit. That’s one thing I’m proud about with these guys. Hopefully other people see that and we’ll get another shot. But it’s not up to us. It’s in somebody else’s hands. So we’ve just got to sit back and wait for whatever they tell us.”
Following Thursday’s loss against the top-seeded Bruins, the Buffs remained at No. 70 in the NET rankings on Friday and No. 59 at KenPom.com, numbers that seemingly should give the Buffs a berth in the 32-team NIT field. Nothing, however, is guaranteed.
A few sites specializing in NIT projections, like the barkingcrow.com, on Friday had the Buffs as a lower seed starting on the road (thebarkingcrow.com had CU as a six seed playing at New Mexico). Others, like dratings.com, don’t have Colorado in the field at all.
Those projections will shuffle in the coming days as conference tournaments across the nation are completed. In a rule that could shift the NIT field, any team that wins its regular season conference championship but doesn’t win the league tournament, and doesn’t get an at-large NCAA Tournament bid, receives an automatic bid to the NIT.
Few of CU’s competitors for an NIT spot have the wildly diverse range of good wins and bad losses as the Buffs. Colorado’s NET remains solid for a 17-16 team thanks to its November neutral-floor wins against Tennessee and Texas A&M, in addition to strong seasons from foes the Buffs lost to away from home in Boise State and Grambling State.
Of course, had the Buffs been able to beat California and Oregon State on the road, and beat Washington at home, CU might be waiting to hear about a bid to the NCAA Tournament instead.
“If we don’t (get a bid) we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves,” CU head coach Tad Boyle said. “If you look at other teams that are 17-15, 17-16, their good wins aren’t even close to ours. What hurts us is our bad losses. The question is, are they going to value the good wins? Or are they going to penalize the bad losses? If you look at the best nonconference wins, it’s not even close.
“But you can’t make a case for yourself when you lose to Cal, when you lose to Oregon State. I thought the loss at Grambling would hurt us but they had a great year. I want to keep playing. I want to keep coaching this team. I want our seniors to have another opportunity to play for a championship. If we do, we do. If we don’t, we’ll turn the page and there’s not much you can do about it.”
