Many things have gone wrong for the Oregon women’s basketball team during its current six-game losing streak.
The Ducks haven’t shot a high percentage, played shoddy defense and got outworked on the boards.
But in this weekend’s series with UCLA and USC, Oregon encountered another problem — prolonged scoring runs by the opposition.
In the early stages of Thursday’s 75-48 loss to the Bruins, the Ducks lost an early lead when UCLA went on a 15-0 run. Oregon was up 13-9 a little over four minutes into the game, but the Bruins took the lead for good with the sustained scoring spurt.
In the second half of USC’s 85-63 win over the Ducks on Saturday, the Women of Troy bettered their Southern California rivals. USC held Oregon scoreless for more than seven minutes during a 19-0 run that put the game away.
Last season, when Duck coach Paul Westhead employed a limited playing rotation, extended scoring droughts could be attributed to exhaustion. This year, as the Ducks go nine or 10 players deep on most nights, the same cannot be said.
“I said to our players that I’d like to help them out by saying, ‘Well, you’re playing so many minutes you get tired,’ but we’ve really done a decent-to-good job of rotating players,” Westhead said. “We’re just going to have to punch through when that bad time happens.”
Alternatively, Westhead can tinker with his substitution patterns to try and spark his team. But in the midst of USC’s critical scoring run, nothing Westhead attempted seemed to work. It wasn’t for lack of trying, however — the coach made a total of nine substitutions, trying desperately to find a combination to stop the bleeding.
“I just try and read how much juice (Oregon’s players) have in them,” Westhead said. “I noticed two or three players were running out of gas, so I tried to fuse a group to try and get us back. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need, and sometimes that’s exactly what your opponent needs.”
This time, it didn’t seem to matter what combination the Ducks put on the court. Oregon missed a few shots, surrendered a couple of offensive rebounds, then began to self-destruct.
“We have a little bit of anxiety, so then we come down on the other end and force a shot or a pass that wasn’t necessarily the best decision to make,” Oregon’s Tatianna Thomas said.
Though there’s no surefire way to prevent extended runs, there a few things Oregon can try to help, such as taking a moment to calm down and keep perspective.
“I think that we have a lot of fight, and it’s something we have to point out and recognize,” Thomas said. “Okay, they scored, well now let’s go and score, but take a decent shot, or at least also then fight for the rebound and I think we’ll be fine.”
While securing offensive rebounds has obvious benefits to a team’s scoring efforts, hitting the defensive boards hard is also critical.
“We need to get rebounds on their missed shots so that we can get out as fast as we can,” Thomas said. “That helps generate our offense.”
In fairness to Oregon, both UCLA and USC put together their extended scoring runs against a shorthanded Duck team. Point guard Nia Jackson, who injured both of her knees in a road game with Washington State last week, was held out of action this weekend, and her presence could have helped Oregon stop the bleeding.
“We do have our leading scorer and leading assist player sitting on the bench,” Westhead said. “Somewhere during those 40 minutes, that could have stemmed the bad things we were seeing in the second half.”
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