Men Look To Take Fight On The Road
By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
In the euphoria of Sunday afternoon at Matthew Knight Arena – after Oregon had upset No. 9 Utah, after the Ducks reached 20 wins for the fifth straight year, after an emotional senior day ceremony honoring Joseph Young and Jalil Abdul-Bassit – head coach Dana Altman provided a sober voice of reason.
Oregon’s NCAA Tournament résumé needed a signature win, and the Ducks got that over the Utes. But anybody who thought the UO men’s work to make the tournament field was done got a reality check from Altman.
“We needed to beat a good team and that helped us, there’s no doubt about it,” Altman said. “This will give us something. Now, whether we can carry it on and make something out of it is our challenge.”
Wednesday night, Oregon plays at California (8 p.m. PT, ESPNU) to open a three-game road swing that concludes the regular season. Based on national projections of the tournament field released since the upset of Utah, Altman was correct – the victory helped, but it didn’t make the Ducks anything like a lock.
Sports Illustrated now projects Oregon into the 68-team tournament field, for the first time all season. But the Ducks are one of the magazine’s “last four in.” Bracket guru Jerry Palm of CBS Sports has the Ducks as a 10 seed, but wrote that there’s “still work to do.” And ESPN also describes Oregon as having “work left to do.”
“The Ducks have been a fascinating story,” Eamonn Brennan wrote for ESPN. “All we need now is an ending.”
The ending will be written in Berkeley, Calif., in Stanford on Sunday, and in Corvallis next Wednesday. The Ducks (20-8, 10-5 Pac-12) will be looking for their first win over the Golden Bears (16-11, 6-8) since 2008; Cal is the only team in the Pac-12 that Oregon has yet to beat in Altman’s five seasons.
“We’ve just got to keep getting better; our schedule gets tough here,” Altman said Sunday. “… That’s a big win at home, but now you’ve got to go test that on the road. So it will be real interesting to see how we bounce back and handle the road.”
The Pac-12 schedule, so varied in recent years to accommodate television, perhaps provided the Ducks some help this week. They’ll take on California just three days after beating the Utes – a shorter gap than between games on the road trip this week to Cal and Stanford. The UO men are looking to maintain momentum, and have a short turnaround in which to do it.
Oregon held Utah to 32.3 percent shooting in the second half Sunday, and outrebounded the Utes 23-14 in the final 20 minutes. That’s the sort of effort Altman and the Ducks want to see the rest of the season, though it would require a level of consistency that’s been fleeting at times.
“We need to build off of that,” Young said. “Coach said we made a step, and we need to keep making steps.”
After the Utah game, Young commended Oregon’s practice habits – “these last three weeks this team has been putting a lot of work in, going 100 percent,” he said – and the Ducks still could put them to use in the search for increasingly better ball movement on offense. The recent effort in practice compelled Young to guarantee last week the Ducks would make the tournament field, and while he looks prescient right now, the Ducks can’t afford to let up.
Against California, they’ll face a team with a personnel profile similar to that of Utah. The Golden Bears have a big, do-everything point guard a la Delon Wright in Tyrone Wallace, who averages 17.4 points, 7.5 rebounds and 3.6 assists per game. They have one of the Pac-12’s most accurate three-point shooters in Jordan Matthews, who scored 14.2 points per game with 44.7 percent three-point accuracy. And they have an imposing big man in David Kravish, who averages 11.0 points, 6.9 rebounds and 1.4 blocks per game.
Oregon brings a hot streak of six wins in seven games into Wednesday night, but California has 12 straight wins over the Ducks. This is a collision between one team badly needing another victory or two for its NCAA résumé and another that it can’t seem to beat.
But the Ducks, who entered this season with just two experienced veterans, and have relied heavily on four true freshmen, have shown signs of putting it all together, never more than against Utah.
“I knew it was there; I knew it was in them,” Altman said Sunday. “I thought we just showed more of it today. Now our challenge is to go show it three more times.”
