Freshman forward Amanda Johnson broke free on a screen, received the pass, went up for a layup from two feet away -and missed everything.
That pretty much summed up the game for the Oregon women’s basketball team Thursday night. The Ducks (8-15 overall, 4-8 Pacific-10 Conference) lost their sixth-straight conference game 58-45, this time to the Washington State Cougars (10-13, 3-9), in front of 2,029 fans at McArthur Court. Johnson led the Ducks in scoring, with 12 points and 10 rebounds, and junior guard Micaela Cocks added 11 points.
“We had a short bench, but offensively we just didn’t hit the shots we needed to win that game,” Oregon head coach Bev Smith said. “We kept them to 58 points, and that’s a winning score for us defensively. But we didn’t do what we needed to on offense to make a team pay.”
The lack of offense by the Ducks in the second half was the key story of the game. Oregon shot 29.3 percent for the game, and the team made just six field goals in the second half. The Cougars didn’t shoot much better, at 34.4 percent, but they hit enough shots down the stretch to put the Ducks away.
“I feel like that we rushed it a bit,” Smith said. “We weren’t getting good shots, sometimes it was hurried and panicked. That’s what I think lost us the game tonight. We got the shots we wanted, but we couldn’t finish them.”
The first half ended on a positive note for Smith and the team, with the Ducks up 27-24 going into the locker room, sparked by nine rebounds and seven points from Johnson.
“I thought we had a good mental outlook, and the first half we really hung together. It was nice to go into halftime with the lead,” Smith said.
But the energy and spark didn’t transfer to the second half, as the Cougars outscored the Ducks 34-18 in the half. That comes from not executing the plays, Johnson said.
“We haven’t been able to step up our execution on offense in the second half of the season,” Johnson said. “Easy baskets will come if we execute in transition, and that just didn’t happen tonight.”
In the end, the Ducks left frustrated and disappointed that they again dropped a winnable game.
“There’s definitely a disappointed feeling,” Cocks said. “We are in a rut, and it’s one of the hardest things to get out of. There were a lot of positives that we can take from this game, but it’s going to take a few steps at a time, especially when you’re coming out of a rut. It’s not easy, but we have to drop this feeling at midnight tonight, because tomorrow is a new day.”
The Ducks will get a chance to break that rut Saturday when they host 5-17 Washington at 2 p.m.
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Ice-cold Ducks fall to Cougars at Mac Court
Daily Emerald
February 12, 2009
Heather Morse
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