I was never much of a fan of Chamberlain Oguchi as a basketball player. His play always came across as cocky, no matter how he was performing on a given night. Even when he was making threes he was a liability on defense, yet he still carried that arrogant swagger.
So when he announced his decision to transfer, I wasn’t surprised. Oguchi exhibited that type of selfishness on other occasions. Typically his decisions are made with his own self-interest, and this is no exception.
When the Ducks traveled to the Bahamas during the summer, Oguchi opted instead to play for the Nigerian national team at the World Championships. Oguchi may have thought competing against some of the world’s top competition would make him a better player. Except we never saw it happen in Ernie Kent’s offense.
Throughout the season, Kent talked about how the Ducks finally grew and matured as a team because of those days spent in the Bahamas. There, they finally learned to play together as a team, Kent said.
Too bad Champ missed out.
Not that skipping the trip was the only thing that caused Oguchi to struggle this season. He did show signs of the player that rained constant threes during the 2006 Pac-10 Tournament, but an ankle injury prevented him from getting into any sort of rhythm, and it didn’t help his cause that freshman Tajuan Porter was playing at an incredible level for most of the year. Porter proved to be an even better three-point shooter than Oguchi and that likely cut into his minutes.
That didn’t help Oguchi’s confidence. And when players he outperformed last year – Bryce Taylor, Maarty Leunen and maybe even Aaron Brooks – began to take their games to a new level, well, that couldn’t have helped either.
After his performance in the 2006 Pac-10 Tournament, Oguchi must have felt like he was capable of being the team’s star. When the Ducks needed a big three, they’d go to him. He was supposed to take this team to another level. Except, Porter and the improved play of Brooks, Leunen and Taylor did instead.
That would explain why he’d want to transfer. Oguchi wants to be the big man on campus, to be the one who keeps his team in games because that’s likely the only way he will be drafted. He has to be the star and shine brighter than anybody else because his game is fairly one-dimensional. He lives and dies on the three-point basket.
Oguchi’s rationale for leaving is that he wants more playing time. That doesn’t make a lot of sense when you figure that if he’s playing well enough to reach the professional level, there’s no doubt he’d be starting for Oregon. There’s no guarantee he’s going to play any better at another college unless he believes he needs to sit out a year (which will happen if he transfers to a Division I college) to work on his game.
Whether his selfishness takes its toll on the team next season will remain to be seen. But already, Oguchi’s roommate and close friend Bryce Taylor is feeling the effects of Champ skipping town.
“I’m sad,” Taylor said. “It’s hard. We’ve been through a lot of stuff together so it’s disappointing.”
If Oguchi improved next season, he could have helped Oregon offset the loss of Brooks. Instead, we’ll have to wonder what could have been if he recaptured his long-range shot and helped complement Porter the same way Brooks did this past season.
Still, maybe the Ducks are better off without his arrogance and spotty defense. Now the pressure’s on one of the big men (Joevan Catron, Frantz Dorsainvil, Ray Schafer or Mitch Platt) to step up and help fill the void created by the departed diva.
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