After a weekend where Oregon played some of its worst basketball this season, it’s fitting that a team comes to town tonight that always seems to bring out the best in the Ducks.
The rivalry between Washington and Oregon, whose heated football rivalry spilled over onto the basketball court in an ugly climax in 2006 when Aaron Brooks punched Husky guard Ryan Appleby in the face during the Pacific-10 Conference Tournament, makes its first appearance of the season tonight at McArthur Court for a 7 p.m. tipoff.
“It’ll be a fun atmosphere,” freshman guard Garrett Sim said.
Now that Brooks and Appleby have left, as well as nearly all the contributors from those teams, all that’s left is two teams still searching for their identities.
In the bigger picture, they’re looking to rebound, which could be the very key to the game.

The Huskies (11-4, 2-1) lost a chance in triple-overtime Saturday to knock off 4-0 California, one of the conference’s rising powers.
As has been the case the past three seasons, a good place to start is by slowing All-Pac-10 senior forward Jon Brockman.
Brockman had 18 rebounds in each game last week against Cal and Stanford, and is eight rebounds away from breaking the school record. He averages nearly 11 rebounds per game.
As a team, Washington leads the Pac-10 by out-rebounding its opponents by an average of 11 per game, and grabs a conference-best 42.8 per night. This comes despite having only two players taller than 6-foot-9, and only three players in the top 20 rebounding individually.
Oregon allows the most rebounds per game in the conference, an unnerving statistic when it comes to the Huskies’ abilities on the glass.
“It’s a man’s game coming in tomorrow,” freshman center Michael Dunigan said. “We gotta keep them off the glass.”
Junior forward Joevan Catron leads the Ducks and is fifth in the conference with 5.7 rebounds per game, but the Ducks are still looking for an increased presence from the big man, Dunigan. One of the most physically intimidating players at 6-foot-10 and 255 pounds, Dunigan has been plagued by foul problems since the start of the conference schedule, averaging 16.5 minutes and more than four fouls when he plays.
“He’s got to have a good game and stay on the floor,” head coach Ernie Kent said.
One of Brockman’s few weaknesses is at the foul line, where he has shot 53 percent this season.
“Sometimes when someone does a poor job … it gets magnified, but he’ll bounce back,” Washington head coach Lorenzo Romar said.
Dispelling any notions of teams employing a “hack-a-Shaq” strategy against his star, Romar said there is a pattern of his shooting getting worse as the game goes on.
“I think that happens more so down the stretch in the second half of games, as opposed to early. He may just wear down.”
While Oregon is defined by its freshmen this season, one of Washington’s newcomers has made a splash already.
Five-foot-8 guard Isaiah Thomas is second on the team and eighth in the conference with 15.7 points per game and adds 3.2 assists, also within the league’s top-10 rankings.
“I think he’s done a great job for them,” Kent said. “He’s quick, he knows how to score and he’s going to present matchup problems for people.”
Senior guard Justin Dentmon is the more experienced half of the guard tandem, averaging 13.3 points per game, and leads the team in steals with 19.
After being benched in the second half against Arizona State by Kent, junior guard Tajuan Porter said the issue was behind both of them.
“It came out at the wrong time, and I had to accept the consequences,” Porter said.
Already with its share of shooting and leadership problems this season, Kent’s answer to a reporter asking about the strength of the league was telling to how he thought his team might do tonight.
“On any given night, anybody can upset anybody,” Kent said.
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