On Saturday night, Oregon proved that sometimes 10 minutes of good basketball can make up for 30 minutes of bad basketball.
Ten minutes is all the time it took for the Oregon men’s basketball team to turn a 13-point deficit into a 21-point lead in its Civil War matchup with Oregon State. The surge helped the Ducks cruise to an 84-66 victory in front of a sellout crowd of 9,087 at McArthur Court.
“That was the best basketball we’ve played all year,” Oregon head coach Ernie Kent said. “It might be the best basketball we’ve played in one stretch since I’ve been here.”
The run started when guards Luke Ridnour and Freddie Jones hit back-to-back three-pointers with 4:55 left in the first half, to cut a 28-15 Oregon State lead to 28-21.
Before those shots, Oregon had made only one three-pointer, and missed five. The Ducks ended up hitting 11 of 27 from three-point land.
“We came out sluggish,” Jones said. “We were too motivated, everyone was hyped up.”
After the guards’ big baskets, Oregon tightened up its defense and stopped Oregon State on all but two of the Beavers’ remaining possessions in the first half. As a result, the Ducks had a 32-32 tie and all the momentum heading into halftime.
“We locked them up defensively, and Oregon State didn’t know what to do,” junior guard Anthony Norwood said. “That shifted the momentum from there.”
Jones capped the Ducks’ first half run with a coast-to-coast reverse lay-in, a play that got Mac Court rocking and had the Beavers returning to the locker room with bowed heads.
In the second half, senior forward Bryan Bracey took over the game. On his way to 28 points, Bracey burned Oregon State’s Jason Heide — who played with four fouls for most of the second half — from the perimeter as well as the post.
“I was just feeling it,” Bracey said.
Bracey made his presence felt three minutes into the half, when Jones tracked down a rebound and found the big forward all alone in the corner, where Bracey nailed his first three-pointer of the contest.
With 13:03 on the clock, Bracey starred in another highlight-reel play that developed when Jones rebounded an Oregon State miss and fed Bracey an alley-oop pass on the ensuing fast break. But the pass was a little off, and Bracey did the only thing he could and reverse dunked it, bringing the crowd to its feet.
“If he’s on, then we want to get him the ball every time,” Jones said of Bracey.
After the Beavers’ Deaundra Tanner scored, Bracey hit a jumper that widened the Ducks’ lead to 57-40 and forced Oregon State to take a time-out. But the break couldn’t slow down Bracey, and he hit a three-pointer on Oregon’s next possession, then was fouled shooting a jumper on the next play after that. Bracey converted the three-point play, and with a jumper on the next possession, ended a two-minute stretch in which he scored 12 points.
“My teammates talked to me in the locker room at halftime,” Bracey said. “They said ‘We need you.’ I knew I had to help my team if we wanted to win the game.”
The 10-minute stretch ended with the Ducks up 65-44, and the Oregon won a sure thing with just under 10 minutes to play in the game.