The Oregon Ducks haven’t had the best history against Texas teams in the past year. In fact, last season, Oregon lost to three of them: Texas Southern, Houston and Baylor in non-conference before starting Pac-12 play.
Tonight wasn’t the same story.
Oregon defeated UT Arlington Sunday night in Eugene with a blowout win 67-47, but the game didn’t feel like a dominating win for the Ducks.
Entering Sunday’s game, the Mavericks were ranked second in the Sun Belt conference preseason polls, so the Ducks knew they would not back down from a fight.
Doing nothing particularly special, Oregon did what they needed to do to scrape by and secure the victory.
Despite the win, head coach Dana Altman was not happy with the effort and defensive play to keep UT Arlington hanging around.
“I didn’t think our energy level was very good,” Altman said. “I didn’t think we bounced around, I didn’t like our ball movement.”
They needed to create some separation from the Mavericks and showed a hint of that when they led by 16 in the first half. But UT Arlington hung around for most of the game, spurring a 7-0 run to cut that lead down to nine.
Veteran Payton Pritchard led all scorers with a quiet season-high of 24 points and eight rebounds and took charge in the second half to create mini leads for his team to edge out.
Pritchard started out the second half with two hard drives into the middle of the Maverick’s 2-3 aggressive zone defense to sustain the lead at nine.
A solid all around game for the senior coupled with Oregon’s defensive stops gave them the push they needed to put them away. The Ducks prepared for the Mavericks to shoot well beyond the arc, so they needed to run them off the line and make them put the ball on the floor. The defense showed as they held the Mavericks to 4 for 17 from three and a 9 for 33 field goal percentage overall.
“We knew coming into the game that they shoot the most threes in the country, or at least in the top ten,” sophomore guard Will Richardson said. “We had to locate the shooters and run them off the line, make them finish at the rim against some of our bigs.”
On the contrary, Oregon shot a solid 50% from three point land to generate the bigger gap in the second half to create a lead as big as 18. Three point additions coming from five players created consistency and sharing the ball across the boards.
“I thought we had some really good looks from three,” said Altman. “We missed a couple that I thought we normally hit, but we’ll take 8 for 20 on most nights. Not bad.”
Although not pretty, Oregon did what it needed to do to secure its fourth straight win of the year, now looking onward toward their game against Houston on Friday, the defending American Athletic Conference co-champs.
Follow Carly on Twitter @carlyebisuya.
