Inconsistent play and injuries continue to be the story for the Oregon women’s basketball team going into the Civil War game Saturday with Oregon State. The Ducks went 1-2 this weekend, losing to No. 9 Stanford and No. 7 California, and the focus for this weekend’s matchup will be picking up the effort and intensity.
“It’s about rest, recovery and having some energy,” Oregon head coach Bev Smith said. “We didn’t play that well (against Portland), but we got the win and that was pretty important after the two tough losses to Stanford and Cal. Our confidence was shaken a bit, and we are going to work on our starts to see if we can come out strong against OSU.”
On the injury front, no new developments have been heard from Oregon’s camp about the severity of an ankle injury junior guard Taylor Lilley suffered during the first half of Monday night’s game against the Portland Pilots. Lilley, who is averaging 11.2 points per game, crashed to the floor late in the first half after colliding with a Pilot defender. She tried to get up and limp her way back down the court, but after a time out she left for the locker room and didn’t come back up to join the team on the bench until midway through the second half.
Smith said that the team would know more following X-rays Tuesday morning, but the preliminary diagnosis was that it was a left ankle sprain.
Lilley’s injury is just another of a long list of maladies that have plagued the Ducks so far this year. Lilley missed the first six games of the year with shin splints, and against Stanford on Jan. 22 she slightly tore a ligament in her left pinky finger.
Besides Lilley, senior guard Rita Kollo is still sidelined with a broken foot, although she did appear at Monday night’s game without the boot on her right foot. Last week, both Smith and Kollo were optimistic that she would return in the next two to three weeks – in time for the second half of the Pacific-10 Conference season.
Sophomore center Nicole Canepa is still on the sidelines, but the word on her is also good. She was walking around without a boot on Monday night, and the team hopes she will return to practice next week.
Besides the injuries, the team’s attitude remains positive. Although they lost big to Stanford and Cal, the win against Portland helped the general mood. Smith says the one big thing right now is the effort level. She felt that the intensity and aggressiveness was lacking at times in all three games, and the key to the rest of the season is how Oregon will play more consistently from one half to the next. Junior guard Micaela Cocks agreed, saying one of the biggest factors in the fluctuating play was the turnovers.
“You can afford to have a few turnovers in a game, but it’s just been sloppy passing and not having a focus of taking care of the ball,” Cocks said. “We have to play 40 minutes of consistent basketball, and not play back on our heels.”
All three games saw a difference in play from one half to the next. In the Stanford game, Oregon played very competitively in the first half against the Cardinal, and the team was only down 10 at halftime. But the Ducks shot 31 percent and were outscored 47-29 after the break, and they lost by 28.
The opposite happened against Cal on Jan. 24. The intermission saw Oregon down 31-10, and it shot 18 percent from the field. After halftime, the Ducks rallied, outscoring the Bears 40-34. Then Monday night, Oregon let the Pilots score seven straight to close the first half, and the team had to rally from behind to pull out the win.
Rest might be the biggest cure, however. Smith gave the team Tuesday off, and they’ll resume preparations for Oregon State today, and she’s confident that they’ll be prepared for the
Civil War.
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