This season is shaping up to be a memorable one for the Oregon men’s basketball team, most recently evidenced by the Ducks’ dramatic come-from-behind victory against No. 20 Washington State at Friel Court in Pullman, Wash., a venue at which the Cougars had yet to lose this season.
The win, after the loss at Washington, gave Oregon sole possession of second place in the conference behind UCLA but the Ducks took over first place after the Bruins fell 75-68 at Stanford on Sunday.
At the mid-way point in the conference schedule, the Ducks have already bested last year’s win total with a current record of 19-2 overall and 7-2 in the conference. One of Oregon’s two losses came at home in a tightly contested 84-82 defeat to USC and the other occurred last Thursday against the Huskies in a game the Ducks were without senior point guard and leading scorer Aaron Brooks, who served the second of a two-game suspension for an incident in the Pacific-10 Conference Tournament last March.
Other than that, the Ducks are perfect and looking vastly different from the team that stumbled to a 15-18 record last season.
The Ducks returned seven of the nine players who received the majority of the minutes last season – a year the Ducks experienced multiple heartbreaking defeats. Oregon lost nine games by four points or fewer and 11 games by seven points or fewer.
That adversity appears to be paying dividends as Oregon’s fortunes have changed. The Ducks have won four games by four points or fewer and eight games by seven points or fewer this season, including the monumental home victory against then-No. 1 UCLA and road victories against ranked opponents No. 18 Georgetown, No. 10 Arizona and No. 20 Washington State.
“Sometimes when you go through so much adversity in your life, you either come up or you’re going to go down,” said Oregon coach Ernie Kent, who is now second all-time on the school’s career victories list. “To their credit, they never wavered. They’ve stuck together and they’re united even stronger.”
The wins against UCLA and Arizona marked the first time the Ducks defeated two top-10 opponents in the same season since twice defeating UCLA in the 1976-77 season.
It’s been a season of many feats for the Ducks.
The 19-2 start is Oregon’s best since the first season at McArthur Court in 1926-27, when Oregon started 24-1 before finishing 24-4. The Ducks’ No. 7 ranking, which might change when new rankings are released today, is the highest since the Ducks held down a No. 5 ranking for two weeks in December of 2002.
And the national media is beginning to notice the Ducks as well.
Entering last week’s games, Oregon was sixth on ESPN’s College Basketball Power Rankings.
In addition, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi has Oregon slated as the number-two seed in the Midwest Region of the NCAA Tournament in his Bracketology projections, and Brooks, who is averaging a Pac-10 best 19.1 points per game and has been huge for the Ducks down the stretch, including two game-winners against UCLA and Arizona, is beginning to enter Player of the Year conversations with such national analysts as ESPN’s Andy Katz, Dick Vitale, Jay Bilas and Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis. Some have even made whispers about Oregon contending for the national title.
“That doesn’t really matter to us,” Kent said. “For us, we’re not going to get too up… or get too down.”
The Ducks have nine games remaining in the regular season, starting with road games against UCLA and USC this week, and ending in the Pac-10 Tournament March 7-10 before awaiting to hear of its postseason fate. The NCAA Tournament begins on March 15.
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