Eighteen games into the season, a few things should be clear for any team that has its sights set on an NCAA tournament run.
Among those includes a rotation: who’s going to start, who’s going to play when the team’s in need of a spark, who’s going to be on the court with the game on the line. In addition, most teams have a few defensive schemes, ones they can turn to when in need of a stop. And players who are well aware of what their role is on the team.
But most teams don’t mimic this iteration of the Oregon’s men’s basketball team, which, 18 games into the season, record-wise, is the worst under head coach Dana Altman since his first year at the helm.
The Ducks dealt with a much-publicized injury bug up until this point. One that, now coming to a close, leaves them scrambling to piece together those aforementioned checkpoints.
They sit at 10-8, and in many ways reflects that dismal mark.
But ask yourself, does this team lack talent? Is it missing the core pieces to make a run in the NCAA tournament?
How could it be?
Talent is at the top of the list if a team wants any chance of competing with No. 9 Arizona — a powerhouse that feeds off perfecting the fundamentals and taking advantage of mismatches. But, Oregon did just that. In fact, it did more than compete. For one night, the Ducks’ talent came together and beat the Wildcats 87-68.
And they did so while toying with lineups and defensive looks on the fly.
Nine players touched the court in the first three-and-a-half minutes, as Altman searched for a rotation. They went man-to-man for the majority of Saturday’s game, after sifting between a 1-2-2 and 1-3-1 zone against Arizona State. Just two days after yet another blowout loss, the Ducks bounced back in a must-win spot — an eerily similar phenomenon to their trip to the mountain states last week.
“We were bad the other night, but we were different tonight,” Altman said. “I’m disappointed in our maturity and the fact that we can’t do that every game.”
The bounce back from Thursday’s loss started with the play of Jermaine Couisnard and N’Faly Dante. Couisnard led the team with a season-high 27 points, while Dante matched the mark he set against Washington State, with 22 points and 10 rebounds to go along with that.
Early on, Dante played the rover position on that man-to-man zone where he sat back waiting for the Wildcats to throw an errant pass. He didn’t have to wait too long.
On the second Arizona possession, he intercepted Kerr Kriisa’s outlet pass, took three dribbles into the paint and dunked it home, over Kriisa.
“That just got us going,” Couisnard said. “We saw him come down the lane and do that, it gave us a lot of confidence.”
To go along with that dunk, the Ducks made it a point to establish a presence in the paint — something they failed to do against ASU. After that loss, Altman called out his team’s physicality.
“All you guys are acting like you’re going to play for 40 minutes, and you’re afraid to touch somebody,” he said.
They responded.
Guard Will Richardson knifed his way through the pair of guards at the top of Arizona’s 2-3 zone, finding space for floaters or dump-downs to Dante. Led by the big-man’s double-digit rebound number, the Ducks finished with a 10-point margin on the boards.
That physicality is a trait they’ll need to cling to moving forward. But back to the personnel decisions, for a moment.
In his fourth game back from injury, Couisnard moved into the starting lineup and found his shooting stroke. He went 6-of-9 from deep and flourished as an off-ball creator, and in catch-and-shoot situations.
He also looked comfortable when the Ducks turned to a three-guard lineup, playing alongside Keeshawn Barthelemy and Richardson. With that trio manning the perimeter, Barthelemy ran the point and facilitated to Richardson and Couisnard, both guards who are more efficient off the ball. It’s a look they’ll surely favor during the second half of the season, one that contains a blend of speed, scoring and scrappiness on the defensive end.
But it wasn’t just Altman’s decisions, nor the play of Couisnard and Dante that helped the Ducks win in a spot where they desperately needed to, two days after a loss they couldn’t afford.
“We didn’t do anything different,” Altman said. “We didn’t scream at them, or anything. We practiced for two hours yesterday, didn’t take any more time, did the same things we always do. They made the adjustment. They made the adjustment.”
“We came to practice and everybody was pissed about it,” Dante said.
“We just came together as a team,” Couisnard said. “We talked among ourselves, ‘we know we’re better than that, what we showed on Thursday.’ I feel like it was a team effort for everybody.”
So the question begs, how do they find that consistency? How do they bring together the talent on this team for more than just one night? How do they focus on each game as an individual matchup when the overarching goal could be jeopardized by any little slip-up?
“We got to stack days on days,” Cousinard said. “We’re not always going to be making shots, like you’ve seen, so we just got to stay together and keep building.”
Saturday’s win was a good start. The Ducks discovered that Richardson and Couisnard play well off one another, and that Barthelemy can empower both when they all share the floor. They learned that when the offense runs through Dante, and they make it a point of going inside, they’re tough to deal with.
Now the challenge becomes keeping the good, the good, harpening on what worked at practice and building on all of it. Because, it’s clear, this team doesn’t lack talent, it’s just still searching for that presence to bring it all together.
