After an embarrassment of a season in which they went 4-25 and had their coach abandon them midway through the year, the Denver Pioneers are well on their way to returning to respectability. In Tuesday's "Pack the House" home opener against a competitive Wyoming team, the DU men's basketball team and new coach Joe Scott earned an impressive 76-65 victory over the Cowboys. Denver got off to a blazing start and led by as many as 22 points before holding off a late Wyoming rally.
One thing we like about Coach Scott is the so-called "Princeton offense" that he brought to DU. He learned that offense as a player and assistant coach under Pete Carril, who created the offense while coaching at Princeton from 1967-1996. By utilizing numerous passes and back door cuts, this offense epitomizes team play, and team play is the main reason why we prefer watching college basketball to the NBA.We hold season tickets for the DU hockey team and women's basketball team, but we typically attend only a couple of men's basketball games each season outside of a handful of scheduled basketball doubleheaders. The next men's game we will probably attend is November 27, when the Pioneers are hosting the Colorado Buffaloes. Even though CU has not been very competitive in men's basketball in recent years, beating a Big XII team would be a big feather in DU's cap.
Incidentally, while Tuesday's game drew a respectable 5,667 fans, it was ultimately outdone by the 6,635 who attended the women's game against Duke two days earlier. Also, this year's cheerleading squad actually features a member who has a prosthetic leg. What don't know what her name is, but we suspect it might be Lacey Henderson, who attended high school at nearby Regis Jesuit High School and served as a cheerleader there in spite of losing a leg to cancer when she was nine.
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