Deja Kelly has the ball and you feel glued.
Fans at Matthew Knight Arena are beginning to know the feeling. Teammates and coaches already do.
But the true test of Kelly’s gravitational pull might have happened late in the fourth quarter in the Ducks’ upset win over then No. 12 Baylor.
On the back of Kelly, the Ducks pulled off an incredible upset, despite not playing their best ball.
No stranger to big moments, the fifth-year North Carolina transfer shared a less-satisfied sentiment.
“It’s important for us to be happy about it,” Kelly said. “But it’s only Game 3, so we’ve just got to continue to build off of it.”
Kelly is a modern face of women’s basketball with a multitude of NIL deals and sponsorships. She has over 400,000 followers on Instagram and often adds to her YouTube channel. Kelly has used Oregon’s new conference as a positive too — hours after the Ducks’ opening-day win over Cal Baptist, she was back on the court as the sideline reporter for the men’s basketball Big Ten+ broadcast.
“That day was busy, the buildup I was super anxious, very nervous,” Kelly said. “But I was doing prep for the men’s game, the notes and ques for the game. There was a cut-off about an hour and a half before my game and I was like ‘ok it’s time to lock in on my game.’”
College kids are in college athletics by choice, but they’re also flawed and exposed nevertheless. Sometimes they’re Deja Kelly, a five-star guard committed to North Carolina, a top program in the country where hoops is everything and the first game of basketball season often results in canceled classes.
But sometimes they’re Kelly four years later, transferring out of that program, heading way out west to a team swirling in basketball anonymity, only receiving questions for her move.
“I was a big part of that program that’s back on the national stage,” Kelly said in a TikTok video addressing the reason for her transfer shortly after her transfer. “I ultimately just carried that program on my back for four years in the most humble way.”
It’s a chore to reconcile doing what you believed you had to do, and getting panned for it — just ask Kelly.
“I found myself not playing with the joy that I used to play the game with,” Kelly said in the video. “That’s as blunt as I can get, and that is not a great feeling. I felt it early on in the season, midseason, to where I really just did not want to play.”
But finally, on the court, she’s found refuge at Oregon. A last chance to be what she insists she can be as a player.
Kelly’s field goal percentage, 3-point percentage and assist rate all dropped from her junior to senior year. She was the Tar Heels’ primary ball-handler with little reprieve, averaging over 36 minutes a game.
“I know that there’s stuff that I have to continue to grow in my game and be consistent at and I felt like me transferring and going to Oregon was going to best help me do that and best prepare me,” Kelly said. “The efficiency? I feel like that will grow in a different system. Obviously, we’ll still see, but I’m pretty confident that a different system will allow me to operate a little better from a basketball standpoint.”
And so she has. Kelly is averaging 44.9% from the field — a ten-point increase from the year prior — and has seen her rebound and assist averages increase from a year ago. She’s shooting the ball less, too — against the Bears she had 20 points. Her next game — a 66-35 blowout win — she had seven.
“Deja, she comes in with so many accolades, but I’m telling you, she does a lot of the dirty work,” Graves said after the Ducks’ win over Nevada. “I can see why she’s so highly regarded by everyone in the country.”
Still, Oregon and Deja Kelly win together, or it’s a five-month-long told-you-so for all her skeptics and doubters.
It certainly won’t all be on Kelly’s shoulders. Graves brought in seven other newcomers from other schools around the country, Oregon is engineered where it won’t all be on Kelly’s shoulders like at times at UNC.
With six unique guards in the backcourt, she’s set up for success and won’t have to do it all like in years past. Oregon fans saw this depth in Kelly’s unselfish play against Baylor.
Kelly had already been on a tear: stepbacks, yo-yo turnaround jumpers, 3-pointers from the top of the key. You name the shot, she’d essentially tried it or had the opportunity to. But this time, her decision-making to cut into the key, and find the streaking Elisa Mevius for a layup was what pushed the Ducks ahead of the Bears.
The ball left Kelly’s hands. Mevius caught it and watched it drop through the net. MKA erupted, and we were all glued to the scoreboard, legitimate proof that women’s basketball was back in Eugene.
“We were trying to get the ball in Deja’s hand,” head coach Kelly Graves said postgame. “She’s kinda made for these moments, and there was so much attention on Deja that there was an open driving lane.”
She didn’t hit the biggest shot of the day, not with the woman they call “Mevius the Menace” earning that nickname anew. But everybody knew the play was called for Kelly and the ball would be in her hands, another example of what she was brought to Eugene to do.
Everyone knows this is Kelly’s team. She’s a magnet that fans, skeptics and opponents alike can’t take their eyes off of.
