Aaron Brooks has made a habit of hitting clutch shots all season – just not against USC.
On Saturday, Brooks missed a game-tying three-pointer in the final seconds as the Ducks (19-4 overall, 7-4 Pacific-10 Conference) fell 71-68 to the Trojans (18-6, 8-3). The last time the two teams met, Brooks missed two key free throws that would have sent the game into overtime and given the Ducks a chance to steal a victory.
Days after playing UCLA for the top spot in the Pac-10, Oregon slides to fifth in the conference and has lost three of its last four games.
“You don’t want to worry and panic, but you need to know there’s a sense of urgency,” Oregon coach Ernie Kent said in a broadcast interview. “We are not in any NCAA tournament. These guys are fooling themselves if they think that.”
Remarkably, the Ducks stayed in the game despite an 11-point deficit at halftime and shooting 33 percent from the floor, compared to the Trojans’ 60 percent shooting.
The reason? Oregon was finally able to out-rebound a team, something that’s been an issue for the Ducks in previous games, particularly on the offensive side.
Oregon grabbed 41 boards, including 23 offensive rebounds compared to USC’s 20 total rebounds.
Even with the Ducks’ dominance on the glass, Kent wasn’t impressed with his team’s ability to stop the Trojans from scoring.
“Starting out and playing terrible defense like that puts you in a hole. Then you’re in a panic mode to come back,” Kent said. “That was a poor, poor defensive performance.”
The team’s lackluster shooting performance didn’t help either. Brooks led the team with 16 points and nine rebounds, but was an uncharacteristic 5-of-14 from the floor and was 2-of-7 from beyond the arc.
Junior guard Chamberlain Oguchi exemplified the team’s shooting woes, however, going 3-of-15 overall and 3-of-11 from three-point range.
Regardless of the team’s inability to score, Kent stressed that the Ducks’ defense is what lost them the game.
“All you got to do is look at stats and they tell you the truth about everything,” Kent said. “In our four losses we’ve given up over 50 percent in the field.”
Kent believes Oregon needs to be more energized at the beginning of the game rather than being an almost exclusively second-half team.
“We’ve got to get more juice out of this team in the first five to 10 minutes on the defensive end of the floor,” Kent said. “All we did in the second half was tighten up that defense.”
In order to do so, Kent believes the team needs to intensify its practices.
“We need to get our butts moving and everything to back where we can play some good defense and get our energy and our spirit back,” Kent said. “We need to go back to boot camp here for a couple of days to get that defensive intensity where it needs to be at.”
Of solace for the Ducks after a tough four-game road stretch is that the schedule now turns in Oregon’s favor. The Ducks will play five of their final seven games at home.
“We’re the only team in the conference that’s had a stretch like this,” Kent said of the Ducks’ four game stretch against Washington State, Washington, UCLA and USC during which they finished 1-3.
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