It’s been 46 days since the Oregon women’s basketball team last won a game. Not at home. Not in-conference. Not by more than a possession. At all.
But the streak will continue — and now, it’s for an unprecedented amount of time.The Ducks (11-19, 2-15 Pac-12) fell once again on Thursday night, this time at the hands of the California Golden Bears (17-12, 7-10 Pac-12), 62-59, and extending their losing streak to a program-record 12 games in a row. The game was closer than most: the final margin does not lie, and the Ducks stayed in the game for far longer than they’ve done in most of the previous 11. But it wasn’t good enough. Oregon’s penultimate game was like too many before it: riddled with mistakes and an overreliance on its big-three that has ultimately doomed the Ducks.
Early on, the Ducks’ defense looked better than it had been on the inside — aside from two 3-point baskets from Ioanna Krimili, Oregon didn’t allow a point for nearly the first three minutes. The Ducks couldn’t take advantage of that though: every shot they took during that spell seemed to fall short or rim out, and the Bears’ shots eventually began to fall.
And fall they did, until Oregon head coach Kelly Graves was forced to call a timeout with 5:48 left in the first quarter. It was already 13-4. The growth of the Bears’ lead didn’t take long: they jumped into that lead courtesy of a 7-0 run that took just 1:28, but it was a tempo that the Ducks couldn’t match. Behind the away baseline, The Duck looked around, bewildered, as Grace VanSlooten missed a wide-open layup.
Oregon fought its way back into the game, though, courtesy of five Bears’ turnovers in four and a half minutes. The Ducks couldn’t find the points that they wanted yet — the score remained 18-12 in Cal’s favor at the end of the first quarter — but the tide had begun to turn. A shot-clock violation from the Bears continued to push the momentum in the Ducks’ favor, and Matthew Knight Arena began to creep to life. The score was respectable, and Oregon had a chance.
However, Oregon’s leading scorer per game on the season, VanSlooten, couldn’t find her rhythm. Sitting at 0-5 from the field after one quarter and without a point until the 4 minute mark in the second period, it looked as if the burden would fall upon the rest of Oregon’s team to keep the Ducks in the game.
They bore that relatively well: the margin never grew larger than 11, and Kennedy Basham continued to perform to the tune of eight first-half points. At the half, the margin was just five, and Oregon was looking to finally break its streak. They weren’t pretty buckets — the Ducks were still 0-4 from beyond the arc and gave away the ball five times — but they continued to fight, largely without VanSlooten on the scoreboard. With the forward sitting at four points and 1-9 from the field after one half, it was becoming possible that Oregon would have to win without her leading on the stat sheet.
“Grace is really good when she attacks the basket and is aggressive,” Graves said. “I didn’t think that she was as aggressive [in the first half], and then I thought in the second half she did a better job of drawing fouls.”
VanSlooten would find Oregon’s first points of the second half — a layup off the break — and then drew a pair of free-throws a possession later that would bring the Ducks within one point. A few minutes — and no Oregon points — later, VanSlooten would find more points of her own from the paint to preserve that slim deficit. “When [Grace] drives, sometimes, she forgets to initiate contact and get calls. We reminded her of that at halftime,” Graves said.
Suddenly, she had become the Ducks’ leading scorer: 12 points at the 4:45 mark in the third quarter. Whatever snake bite that had affected her in the first half seemed to have found the rest of the roster instead, and the game was once again on VanSlooten’s shoulders.
Then, suddenly, with Chance Gray isolated as the clock ran out in the third quarter, something happened that Oregon hasn’t had in a minute. As time expired, her 3-point effort swished, and the game was tied, 42-42. It was only the second basket that a Duck not named Grace VanSlooten had made since the half, but it was the most vital, and as Matthew Knight Arena blasted ‘Shout’, it wasn’t getting ‘a little bit softer’. That momentum invigorated Graves’ team, and out of the break, two consecutive buckets from Phillipina Kyei and Chance Gray pushed Oregon into its first lead of the night.
The Ducks still had to close out the game, though, and the final eight minutes would tell that story. A Kyei block. A Gray pullup jumper. And a defensive tenacity that finally emerged from its shell.
Krimili near-single handedly kept Cal in the game with multiple made shots and drawn fouls that turned that period into a marathon for the Ducks, but the defense was just good enough. On average this season, Oregon allows 66.8 points per game — 239th of 360 college teams according to Sports Reference. Tonight, it held the Golden Bears to 62.
With two minutes to play, a reverse layup from Krimili vaulted Cal back into the lead and Graves called his timeout. Postgame, Graves called the guard, “A little Larry Bird and a little Steph Curry”. He cited her matchup with VanSlooten. “Grace is long and athletic,” he said, “…and I thought that she would be able to take that pass away.”
Surrounded by Kyei and Sarah Rambus, Krimili couldn’t pull points out of the hat, and a shot clock violation handed the ball back to Oregon with the game tied and a minute to play. Painfully, a Gray 3-point effort coasted through the air underneath the rim, and the score remained even.
Directly down the floor, a foul call went against Kyei and the Ducks. Cal had the ball back with 42.6 seconds to play, and a mass scramble gave the Golden Bears two shots to take the lead with 33.7 seconds to play, but left their guard Leilani McIntosh on the court in pain. Under pressure, they could only add one to their tally. In what had become a game of coolness under pressure, Kyei couldn’t make either of her two opportunities from the line on the other end. Opposite that, Krimili re-emerged to make four free-throws through two sets and extend the lead to three — and that’s all that Cal would need.
“We had a chance,” Graves said. “We had a chance, and there were just a couple of stretches that were late defensively, and then we had opportunities to win the game.”
This one was so close, but Oregon stumbled at the final hurdle. Its defense evaporated — Cal made seven of its last nine field goals — and so did its composure, and misses from the free-throw line cost this team. The final night of conference play will be a homestand against No. 4 Stanford on Saturday at 2:00, and it’ll be this team’s last time at Matthew Knight Arena as a Pac-12 representative.
