After suffering a 21-point loss to Utah on Thursday, Head Coach Ernie Kent spoke about his team needing to play with more toughness and energy heading into Saturday’s contest against the Colorado Buffaloes.

It was apparent the team received Kent’s message as the Cougars (9-10, 1-6) held the Buffaloes (15-5, 4-3) to 39 percent shooting from the field along with limiting their leader on offense, senior forward Josh Scott to just 11 points.

However, poor free-throw shooting cost the Cougars another chance of securing a victory in conference play. WSU missed 11 free-throws which was the difference in a 75-70 loss to Colorado on Saturday in Beasley Coliseum.

“I look at that number – 16-of-27 – and I don’t know how many of those were front ends of one-and-ones,” Kent said. “That’s probably an even bigger number that’s sitting there and those guys feel terrible. We’ll just rally them up and I’m really proud of them, the way they bounced back from the Utah game.”

Kent also gave credit to the 3,321 fans present in Beasley Coliseum for their support and help of keeping the Cougars in the ball game.

“The energy in the building, how loud it was, just a great atmosphere for us to play in,” Kent added. “It’s just unfortunate that we did not close out the game for these people. It was a good college basketball game and it was there for us to close it out and we didn’t do it.”

The Cougars did have a chance to send the game into overtime with 15 seconds left on the clock, but WSU junior guard Ike Iroegbu missed a potential game-tying 3-pointer. On the ensuing possession Colorado sophomore George King hit two free-throws to seal the victory for Colorado.

“I was supposed to get it a little smoother, but even when I have the ball, I have to step up and make a play for my team and I didn’t do that,” Iroegbu said. “And just got to learn from it.”

After tallying just seven points on 2 of 8 shots against Utah on Thursday, Iroegbu knew he needed to step up if the Cougars were going to have any shot of knocking off Colorado. Indeed he did as the former Oak Hill Academy guard scored 27 points on Saturday, one point shy of his career high of 28.

“I know I had a pretty bad game against Utah, so I knew I had to step it up for my team and the community in this game,” Iroegbu said. “I had to come and have a big game and play really well and I felt like I did a good job of driving to the basket and finishing with my layups.”

For a majority of the game Iroegbu could get to the basket whenever he wanted to and did a solid job of finishing at the rim.

Kent said the reason for Iroegbu’s success was him and his coaching staff deciding to open up the offense more for the players to play freely rather than abide by the book 100 percent of the time.

“That was us, maybe even doing too much coaching with this group. We need to learn, as well, too, to maybe let them have more freedom to play,” Kent said. “And I thought it was a big adjustment on our part and I thought our guys responded to it.”

WSU junior forward Conor Clifford also bounced back against Colorado after being held scoreless in the Utah game. On Saturday Clifford could not be contained in post and scored 18 points on 8 of 9 shooting from the field.