Ducks Look To Crack Homecourt Advantage

Oregon has a chance to make a big statement this weekend in the race for the Pac-12 men's basketball title — if the Ducks can figure out how to do something almost nobody else has done well this year.

The No. 14 Ducks left Wednesday evening for Arizona, where they'll play at Arizona State on Thursday (6 p.m. PT, ESPN) and then at No. 24 Arizona on Saturday (6 p.m. PT, ESPN). Oregon entered the week tied for first in the Pac-12 with Colorado, a half-game ahead of ASU and Arizona and a full game up on USC and UCLA.

So the Ducks could return home after this weekend having gained separation from some of their chief rivals for the conference crown. Or, they could find themselves in danger of slipping out of the top four in the league, and thus forced to play on the opening day of the Pac-12 Tournament next month.

"We're trying to come up with two wins on the road, and put ourselves in a great place for the tournament," freshman forward Chandler Lawson said. "… Every game is like a championship game. You've just gotta win."

Winning twice this week will require beating the Pac-12's hottest team in ASU, which is on a five-game win streak, along with Arizona, which is back in the top 25 after a one-week absence. And it will require winning twice on the road, which has been exceedingly difficult this season across the Pac-12.

With three weeks left in the regular season, Pac-12 teams are 53-23 at home in conference play for the year, a winning percentage of .697. That's a big jump from last season, when home teams were 64-44 in Pac-12 play, a winning percentage of .593.

"This year," UO coach Dana Altman said, "home court has meant quite a bit."

Four Pac-12 teams had winning records on the road in conference play last season, while just two are above .500 so far this year — Arizona and ASU. In 2018-19, there were nine instances of Pac-12 teams sweeping a weekend series on the road; it has happened just three times this season, and for the first time in the Pac-12 era there were no road sweeps in January.

Oregon hasn't been immune to struggles on the road. The Ducks are the only team in the top four of the current Pac-12 standings with a losing record away from home in conference play, at 3-4. In three of those losses — at WSU, Stanford and Oregon State — the Ducks had a lead at halftime.

"We realize what we need to fix and how we need to toughen up," UO senior guard Anthony Mathis said. "And I think we're gonna do that on this road trip."

For Altman, the formula in road losses has been all too familiar.

"We hit a spot where we didn't score, and our defense didn't carry us, and our board play didn't carry us," the UO coach said. "Good road teams, they have board play and defense carry them when the shots aren't falling."

Altman said he's seen a better sense of urgency from the Ducks recently. They're coming off a sweep of Utah and Colorado — albeit at home, where success has been much easier to find this season, for Oregon and everyone else in the Pac-12.

Now that sense of urgency has to show up on the road, particularly on the defensive end, where improved communication has been a key to the Ducks' recent progress.

"On the road we get pretty quiet as the fans start to get super loud, when we need the opposite to happen," Mathis said. "We need to get louder as the fans get louder, start communicating more. So I think we're starting to realize that. ...

"We used to rely on offense a little bit too much. And now, we've seen from the losses we've had that we can't do that. You need to play defense on the road to get big wins."