Bobby Hurley rips Arizona State defense after loss to Colorado: 'We stink'

Bobby Hurley ripped his team’s defense in Arizona State’s 78-70 loss to Colorado on the road Saturday. It dropped the Sun Devils to 12-12 on the year as it’s been the same theme for weeks.

Hurley and his defense gave up 75+ points for the ninth time in 11 Big 12 games against the Buffaloes. There seems to be no solution to the problem at the moment.

“We stink on defense,” Hurley said postgame. “Okay? We gave up 50%, so whether it was  man or zone, I don’t know what the ratio was exactly, but 50-50, 60-40, man or zone, we were bad at both. So it was ‘pick your poison.’”

Arizona State trailed 39-31 at halftime and despite a second half rally, the hole was too big. Moe Odum put up 23 points and five assists in the loss.

Just a week ago, Hurley claimed it’s too late for Arizona State to put things together to try and get it going. With less than 10 games left, he might be right.

“It’s kind of too late to put things together, I would say,” Hurley said last week. “But, more or less, we’ve been scrappy. We compete. We’ve beaten Texas, beaten Oklahoma, beat Santa Clara. Close games. Fortunate to win a couple of them. We’ve kind of done as good as we can do.

“… Today we played as good of basketball as this team was probably capable of. Now, we should be able to shoot free throws better. There’s no excuse for that. There had to be two or three more rebounds that we should have gotten that we didn’t get. Maybe if you do that, it closes the gap a little. Came close to our ceiling.”

Even with these efforts, Hurley was also disappointed in the lack of ASU fans when the Sun Devils played rival Arizona, the No. 1 team in the country.

“Our fans that did show up were vocal. Unfortunately, there were too many red shirts in the arena,” Hurley said. “It was not a home game. It was like a crowd, 50-50, 60-40, either way. It’s hard to say. But, it was loud in there both ways. When they got it going, it was loud. When we had our little spurt, it got loud. I got no real strong opinion on it.”

Hurley and Arizona State continue their campaign Tuesday at home against Oklahoma State. Tipoff is set for 9:00 p.m. ET.