Oregon women’s basketball has set out for Tampa Bay, where the second-seeded Ducks will take on top-seed Baylor in the Final Four.
It’s the first time that Oregon will be in a women’s Final Four, and the team wasted no time after its Elite Eight win against Mississippi State, scouting both Iowa and Baylor on the team’s bus ride back to Eugene from Portland.
“I’m excited. It’s funny, I’m kind of reminded of the old Sesame Street “One of these things is not like the other,’” Oregon head coach Kelly Graves said. “You look at coach Mulkey — she’s won two national championships, Muffet McGraw’s won two and Geno’s won maybe more than I have fingers. This is our first time. It’s a new experience for us but this team has been under the microscope and had a lot of pressure on them and a lot of eyes and attention all year long. It’s a bigger stage but I think we’ll be used to it.”
Oregon is going up against the top team in the nation as the Bears hold a 27-game win streak going to Tampa. The Bears dispatched Iowa 85-53 in the Elite Eight on Monday night and, according to FiveThirtyEight, have an 85 percent chance of winning the national semifinal against the Ducks.
The Ducks will have another tough matchup in the paint with Kalani Brown and Lauren Cox.
“They’re so big,” Graves said. “The good thing is we just got done playing Teaira McCowan so we’ve at least had a little bit experience trying to defend a powerful post player. But Kalani Brown brings something different than Teaira. She’s more mobile around the basket, can hit that midrange shot. She’s a lot more skilled.
“And then you have Lauren Cox who can do the same thing, they kind of play volleyball. They throw it up and rebound over people.”
The Ducks stifled McCowan in December but the 6-foot-7 center had Oregon’s number after the first half in the Elite Eight but in the second half, Ruthy Hebard made clutch plays against McCowan to help swing things Oregon’s way.
Reversely, Baylor will have to find ways to also stop Hebard from scoring, but Baylor head coach Kim Mulkey says her team has been prepared for it with the way her bigs play.
“If you watch us play you’ll go ‘Wow their bigs run the floor from foul line to foul line, they never stop,’” Mulkey said via teleconference on Tuesday. “Then we bring in two athletic freshmen that do the same. So it won’t be because of what we need to do against Oregon, that’s who we are. We’re going to push the ball in transition and those bigs get up and down the floor.”
Even if Baylor has an answer for Hebard, Oregon has prolific 3-point shooters it can rely on.
“We’ve seen teams change their approach when they play us that they do shoot more 3s than they normally would,” Mulkey said. “So it’s not going to be uncommon or uncomfortable to expect that or see that. Certainly, we will defend like we always do with the understanding that we’ve got to defend the 3-ball. We know what we face and how good they are from the 3 and how hard it is to defend them out there.”
Though the Ducks are heavy underdogs in this Final Four, they are sticking to what has got them to this point.
“We’re not going to change. We are who we are,” Graves said. “I told everyone that if I ever make the Final Four, have the chance at a National Championship and I change, you can slap me upside the head because I don’t want to be any different than I normally am.
“We’re going to go in with a happy go lucky attitude like we’ve had and when the lights go on we’re going to be ready to play.”
Follow Shawn Medow on Twitter @ShawnMedow
