The Oregon men’s basketball team goes into games this week against Washington on Thursday and Washington State on Saturday, winless and in last place in the Pacific-10 Conference.
The Ducks’ recipe for this lack of success has been allowing a conference-worst 47.2 percent made field goals by their opponents while shooting a conference-worst 41.2 percent from the floor.
The shooting troubles, said Oregon head coach Ernie Kent, are a matter of confidence.
While the tough competition the Ducks faced in the preseason should benefit their long-term development by conventional wisdom, in the short-run it has left them uncertain on the floor.
“We lost some confidence along the way. Maybe if we’re playing the lower-level schools and things like that and we’re beating people by 20 and 25 points our confidence is a little different, because you can get on some runs and some rolls and you’re confident and guys are having fun and all that,” he said.
“We’ve had a tough, tough preseason where they’ve been in such dogfights with good defensive teams, teams that have run us, teams that have fatigued us. They’ve done some things that way that have not been able to keep them in a great rhythm with their confidence.”
Growing pains are nothing new and no reason to panic for the coach, who said the struggles of this season’s young team are similar to the class of Luke Ridnour and Luke Jackson, along with the class of Maarty Leunen and Malik Hairston.
“They came in young and took their lumps and sure enough here they came and both of those teams went to the Elite Eight,” he said. “I think having gone through it you can stay in the process and keep them positive and stay confident … You’ve got to bring it every day to get getting them better because they have a chance to be really good, and I want to make sure we don’t waste a day of coaching them, teaching them, and keep them in a frame of mind where they continue to grow.”
Kent pointed out one notable difference between this season’s incoming class and those in the recent past.
“We’ve got more of them this year and we’re counting on more of them this year,” he said. “The groups are similar in that they both at times struggled to shoot the ball. That’s all a confidence thing.”
And though the record isn’t what the coach would like it to be, he said that the team is reacting to these setbacks in the best possible way.
“The freshmen are dealing with it well because everything is so new to them and everything is coming at them so fast … they’ve been in adversity from day one when they walked in the door,” Kent said. “They still come back to practice with energy and the right attitude and as long as they continue to do that they’re going to continue to get better.”
The team has yet to find its rhythm offensively for any length of time, save a stretch of the second half against UCLA, but when the shots are falling for this team Kent said he likes what he sees.
“When they’re on, they’re a pretty good basketball team. Obviously, any coach will tell you, when a team’s making shots it sure makes the game a lot easier,” he said. “We’ve been putting a lot of pressure on ourselves defensively, when we’re not making shots, to be perfect and we’re not perfect, and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes with these young guys.”
[email protected]
Growing pains, shooting woes keep Ducks at bottom of Pac-10 standings
Daily Emerald
January 13, 2009
More to Discover