The Oregon men’s basketball team has two games remaining in January, a month the Ducks have greatly struggled in over the last two seasons.
As Pacific-10 Conference play began on Dec. 30 with a home contest against Arizona, the Ducks were 7-5 overall with consecutive losses to Virginia and Idaho fresh on their minds.
A 19-point defeat to the Wildcats was the third in a line of six straight losses for first-year head coach Dana Altman. It wasn’t until the home opener at Matthew Knight Arena on Jan. 13 that Oregon picked up its first conference win.
Oregon is 2-4 this month with road matchups at Stanford on Thursday and California on Saturday. If the Ducks can pick up a pair of wins in the Bay Area, they would finish the month 4-4, a drastic improvement from their 0-9 mark in January 2009 and their 3-5 finish a season ago.
“I think we took a step at Oregon State,” Altman said after practice on Tuesday. “But now you’ve got to go take another step to stay up with everybody. I mean everybody feels like they’re getting better.”
Facing Stanford (10-8, 3-4 Pac-10) in Palo Alto, Calif., a team Oregon hasn’t defeated since Feb. 21, 2009, will provide some interesting challenges for the young Ducks squad. The Cardinal features the best scoring defense in the conference, allowing just 60.6 points per game, but also have the worst scoring offense across the board at 63.4 points per night.
Juniors Jeremy Green and Josh Owens will provide challenging individual matchups for the Ducks. Green, a 6-foot-4 guard from Austin, Texas, ranks seventh overall in Pac-10 scoring with 14.7 points per game. Though the Cardinal did lose its leading scorer from last year, Landry Fields, to the NBA, Green has stepped up in his absence. When the two teams met last year, Green torched the Ducks for 18 points on 10-for-10 shooting from the free throw line.
Altman welcomes the challenge.
“It’s later in the season, we feel like we’re making progress,” he said, “but I’m sure most teams we’re playing against feel like they’re making progress. So we’ve got to keep getting better.”
Owens, a 6-foot-8, 230-pounder, leads Stanford in steals (18), blocks (16), rebounds (124), and field goal percentage (57.6) through 18 games this season. The junior redshirted last year after playing in all 34 games as a sophomore in 2008-09. His 6.9 rebounds per game rank eighth in the Pac-10 standings.
California matches up with Oregon much better in terms of experience. After losing a handful of seniors — including four starters — at the end of last season, head coach Mike Montgomery has essentially started over with a large group of underclassmen.
The Golden Bears roster is composed of five freshmen, four sophomores, three juniors and one senior. Juniors Harper Kamp (14.4) and Jorge Gutierrez (11.9) provide much of Cal’s scoring punch.
“They can put a big team out there when they want to, and that’ll give people problems,” Altman said.
Oregon hasn’t beaten the Golden Bears since sweeping the 2007-08 season series, which included a 22-point victory in Berkeley. That was also the last season the Ducks played in the postseason, falling in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to Mississippi State weeks later.
While a sweep of the Bay Area schools in the coming days is unlikely, returning home with at least one win could provide a spark as Oregon hits the final stretch of the league schedule. After this weekend, five of Oregon’s next seven games will be at home.
“It’s a tough weekend for us,” Altman said. “It’s a big weekend, but it’s going to be a tough weekend.”
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