It will be a business trip full of opportunity for a new-look roster eager to make a meaningful first impression.<\/p>\n
It should not, however, be considered a viable preview of what\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n
That was the prevailing message this week from head coach Tad Boyle as the Colorado men\u2019s basketball team went through its final workouts ahead of a four-game exhibition tour in Australia.<\/p>\n
With a sizeable cast of new players, along with a few absences from the trip, there will be playing time aplenty for the entire roster.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to get a look at everybody,\u201d Boyle said. \u201cWe\u2019ll kind of get a feel for that when we\u2019re over there. We\u2019ve got four games in a short period of time. I\u2019m not worried about playing time. I\u2019m just worried about learning, getting better, having opportunities to play against somebody else other than ourselves. It\u2019ll be a great opportunity. But everybody will get a chance to play a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Buffs were scheduled to leave on Wednesday evening, with a layover in the Bay Area before embarking on the 16-hour flight to Melbourne.<\/p>\n
CU opens its competition on Saturday against the club Hoop City in Melbourne and will play another game on Tuesday. The Buffs then will face the biggest challenge of the trip on July 31 against the Australian Boomers, the country\u2019s national team. That matchup begins at 2:30 a.m. MT (overnight Wednesday into the early hours of Thursday morning) and will be broadcast on ESPN+, the only game during CU\u2019s trip that will be streamed live.<\/p>\n
The Buffs complete the trip in Sydney on Aug. 4 against the Sydney Kings, a club coached by the father of CU assistant and former Buffs player Nate Tomlinson.<\/p>\n
The Buffs head Down Under still with a roster spot available. And they will be without two frontcourt players in Bangot Dak, who is recovering from an injury, and freshman Tacko Ifaola, who isn\u2019t making the trip due to the status of his student visa.<\/p>\n
Of the 12 players traveling, three of the newcomers \u2014 freshman guard Isaiah Johnson, Denver transfer Jon Mani, and 7-foot-1 freshman Leonardo Van Elswyk \u2014 arrived in Boulder after summer workouts began, with Mani and Van Elswyk joining the mix in recent weeks. Among the four returning players making the trip, one of them, second-year wing Andrew Crawford, is coming off a redshirt season.<\/p>\n
The trip will be a valuable checkpoint in stoking team chemistry off the court. On the court, Boyle said he expects to put a higher focus on evaluating what the glut of new Buffs can do individually than tinkering with predetermined combinations.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not concerned with combinations right now. I just want to give guys minutes and see what they do with them,\u201d Boyle said. \u201cThere will obviously be different combinations on the court. I would not put any stock in the starting lineups at this point. I don\u2019t know how much (walk-on) Nick Randall will get to play, but in terms of the scholarship guys, they will all get minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve obviously had 10 practices and a handful of workouts to evaluate. But now we\u2019ve got evaluations against solid competition. We\u2019re going to compete and play to win, but winning and losing are not what these trips are about. These trips are about learning about your team, learning about your players. There might be combinations that we look at and learn from, but we\u2019ll see a lot of different lineups.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally Published: July 23, 2025 at 2:56 PM MDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It will be a business trip full of opportunity for a new-look roster eager to make a meaningful…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,18881,18882,18883,4044,2662,25236,3832,4142,2558,398,400,401,99],"class_list":["post-33474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-boulder","tag-boulder-county","tag-buffzone","tag-college-basketball","tag-college-sports","tag-college-menu2019s-basketball","tag-colorado","tag-front-range","tag-latest-headlines","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}