Gabe Madsen leads with 17 points as Runnin' Utes pull away from Colorado

SALT LAKE CITY — Wednesday night's game between Utah and Colorado would never be mistaken as a thing of beauty.

It was a clunker of a game between two teams struggling to find an identity — or consistency — in the new landscape of the Big 12. But for being a disjointed game, the Runnin' Utes came out on top in a 72-59 win at home.

"It wasn't the prettiest of games, but, obviously, it's good to finish a game like that," Utah's Gabe Madsen said.

The game lacked finesse and was anything but glamorous as the two teams traded moments of bad basketball, but Utah head coach Craig Smith said his team's defense helped be the difference Wednesday night — even if it was a game he described as being "interesting" and "a choppy game."

"It's a good win for us," he said. "It's a game we needed to win."

Utah (13-9, 5-6 Big 12) controlled a 12-point lead at halftime and looked like it could pull away for good against a Colorado (9-13, 0-11 Big 12) team that is winless in conference play, but the Buffaloes charged back early in the second half to cut the deficit to 48-46 with 8:01 to play.

It wasn't enough, though, as Utah did just enough to stay in front en route to the team's fifth win in conference play.

"The key was we were getting stops defensively," Colorado coach Tad Boyle said. "And that's the only way you come back from down 12 to cut it to 2 is to get stops; it's the only way you can do it. You can't do it by trading baskets, you can't do it by not scoring and letting them score.

"The only way you can do is you get stops so they don't score, and you've got to come down and score, and that's what we did to get back in the game. But then we quit getting stops, and then we started turning it over again, and then it goes back to 12 and it's ball game."

A win's a win, but Utah has been trending in the opposite direction after a three-game winning streak that was capped off with an emotional home win over in-state rival BYU on Jan. 18. Since then, Utah has struggled to find a rhythm or consistency in a stretch of the schedule that has been seemingly easier than the start to conference play.

And at one point — and many times later throughout the game to a lesser degree — Utah fans heckled their own team.

"They're called free throws — free!" one fan shouted loudly, while a majority of the Huntsman Center crowd let their emotions be known with hearty boos in the first few minutes of the game.

Utah started the game 1-of-8 from the free-throw line, and it didn't get much better from there, even if there were stretches of a few makes. The team finished the night shooting 18-of-35 from the line.

"When you're at home, of course, you want your fans to support you and be all in, but I know it's frustrating," Smith said. "Yeah, I get it. ... But it's also like, step up to the plate, you know what I mean, and own it. With the time you've put in, you've got to own it and have conviction with what you're doing.

"You've gotta have conviction, conviction to what you're doing," he added. "You've spent the time, you're putting in the reps, own it, believe in yourself, trust in yourself, and go do it. And so it's easy to say that, and it's a fine line of over talking about and under talking about it."

But even as early free-throw woes kept Utah in a close game, the team eventually found some consistency late to finish the game on a 17-4 run over a three-minute period to reclaim a double-digit lead.

"I've never coached a team that shot 38% from the field and felt like, 'Man, we should have won that game,'" Boyle said. "But we didn't; they did. They made plays down the stretch and we didn't."

The Madsen twins led the Utes in scoring, with Gabe Madsen finishing with a team-high 17 points on four made 3-pointers on the night, including a buzzer-beating shot between two defenders to go into the halftime break.

Mason Madsen added 10 points and five rebounds in 13 minutes. Lawson Lovering contributed 12 points and six rebounds against his former team, while Ezra Ausar rounded out the scoring with 10 points — including a one-handed fastbreak dunk late in the game — and seven rebounds.

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