Senior Aaron Brooks hasn’t had an easy career at Oregon.
He broke his hand while punching the backboard support his freshman season, he’s lost games in the final seconds by dribbling the ball off his foot and then there was the incident with Washington’s Ryan Appleby last year.
And now that his career at Oregon has almost come full-circle, Brooks was at a loss of words when asked how he’ll feel entering McArthur Court as a player one last time.
“I don’t know yet,” Brooks said. “My senior year in high school, I was kind of happy to get out of there. But you never know what’s going to happen after this year. I don’t know, there’s going to be a lot of emotions for me.”
Oregon coach Ernie Kent has seen Brooks develop as a player and as a person in the years they’ve been together. For Kent, he expects Saturday to be significant for the Ducks’ mercurial star.
“He’s grown so much inside and everything else. It’s going to be one special senior day with everything he’s had to overcome and the success he’s having this year,” Kent said.
And after having stopped its recent slide, Brooks and the rest of the team face one last challenge before it enters tournament play – the Civil War.
“It’s a Civil War game, it’s the seniors last game, it’s a momentum game, it could be a (NCAA tournament) seeding game down the road – it just becomes a very big ball game for us,” Kent said.
Although Oregon State (11-19 overall, 3-14 Pacific-10 Conference) has had a sub-par season, sitting near the bottom of the league standings for the majority of the season. But the Beavers played inspired basketball against Washington State and their victory against Washington gives the Ducks (22-7, 10-7) a reason to believe that it will not simply be a pushover.
That and the last time the two teams met, Oregon slipped by the Beavers 76-73 in Corvallis.
“Malik (Hairston) didn’t play in the game, Champ (Oguchi) was coming back from an injury, Aaron Brooks had a very bad game,” Kent said. “We just didn’t play well. We were lucky to win the game over there.”
But since then, the Ducks have improved themselves so much that Kent said the team shouldn’t give a similar performance.
“It seems like we’re so far from that right now in terms of how we’re playing,” Kent said. “I think they’ve got their swagger back.”
The team didn’t have practice either Monday or Tuesday partly because there was no game Thursday. The Ducks were happy to receive the time off and should be well rested after their recent grind.
“This was good for us because we’ve only got one game this week and with most of us playing 30 minutes per game – it’s nice to get that little break at this point in the season going into tournament time,” junior forward Maarty Leunen said.
While Kent said the team deserved a break, the reason he’s worked them so hard is to make sure Oregon reaches the NCAA Tournament this year after being left out of the past three.
“The trophy is March Madness. That’s why we push them, that’s why we’re in it,” Kent said.
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