This season has become one of small victories (as the scoreboard variety have become scarce) and small steps forward for the men’s basketball team.
Saturday’s 76-69 loss to California at Haas Pavilion contained a few of these small steps. Tajuan Porter is heating up, as he dropped in 26 points on 5-of-10 from long range, and the rest of the team seemed to find some offensive rhythm in the second half, shooting 48.6 percent from the field as a team.
Their shooting performance at California, 44.4 percent for the game, was the first time the Ducks have broken the 40-percent mark for an entire game since shooting the same percentage against UCLA, their only other single-digit conference loss.
That’s nearly three weeks of sub-40 percent shooting, a recipe for disaster for a team that came into the weekend allowing opponents to shoot 47 percent from the field while scoring almost
77 points per game, both conference-worst marks in those categories.
But this weekend held no victories at the defensive end of the floor, as Oregon allowed 77 and 76 respectively, right at their conference-worst average, while Stanford shot 50 percent and Cal shot a staggering 66.7 percent.
The only development of note on the defensive end was the seemingly revitalized defensive play of sophomore guard LeKendric Longmire, who notched three steals Saturday and got back to being the pest he was at times last season. Longmire was key to last season’s team as a defensive stopper. I thought Jerryd Bayless was going to cry (he did throw several decent hissy fits) last year at Mac Court when Longmire put the clamps on him, completely disrupting Bayless’ game. Oregon needs that desperately from Longmire again this season and he showed flashes of it Saturday.
And Oregon actually won the second half at Cal 41-40, which marked just the second time this season that the Ducks have outscored a conference opponent in either half. It was the first time they have done so on the road. Thursday against the Cardinal was the first time they had played a conference opponent to a draw in either half on the road, with a 37-37 performance in the second half.
Another minor turnaround for the Ducks was free-throw shooting during both road games. Thursday against the Cardinal the Ducks went 14-of-16 (87.5 percent) from the line, easily their best effort at the line in conference play and more than 30 percent higher than their low, an 11-for-20 (55 percent) night against Arizona State two weeks ago. Saturday they were 15-of-20 (75 percent) from the line, 9-of-10 in the second half, to notch their second-best free throw shooting night in league play.
Saturday will mark the first time in a long time that the Ducks will go into Gill Coliseum to take on the Beavers as underdogs looking up at Oregon State in the conference standings. All the Beavers did last weekend was sweep the Bay Area schools on the road to improve to 3-5 in Pac-10 play, 8-10 on the season.
If Oregon doesn’t somehow manage to gain its first conference win in Corvallis on Saturday, I don’t know if there are enough moral victories in the world to wash the sour taste of a winless first round of conference play out of Duck fans’ mouths.
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Victories in Bay Area moral, not actual
Daily Emerald
January 24, 2009
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