After a blazing start to the Pac-12 season, the Oregon Ducks have fallen off.
It started with a difficult road trip to Colorado and Utah, where the Ducks picked up a pair of losses. Then, it was a home loss to the Arizona Wildcats — a game where Oregon never seemed to have a chance — that kept the ball rolling in the wrong direction. Most recently, it was a road loss to the UCLA Bruins, who had a losing record entering the game.
All season, Oregon head coach Dana Altman has hammered home that the Ducks need to improve their defensive tenacity if they want to win games and be successful in March. But on Tuesday, Altman highlighted a bigger issue that may be the root of some of the Ducks’ problems.
“We’ve got a little bit of a bad habit,” Altman said. “Really good teams, whether they are hitting shots or not, they play with tremendous energy. We have a tendency when the balls not going in, we don’t play with that same intensity. That bothers me. We have enough old guys; you expect that with freshmen because that’s how they’ve always played, but older guys should have figured out by now that there are just going to be games where it’s not going in.”
There have been plenty of games “where it’s not going in,” for Oregon this season, and like Altman said, the team has been unable to find a different way to attack their opponent and win games.
Against Arizona, the Ducks were losing entering the second half, but the deficit would’ve been manageable if they had been able to diversify their offensive approach and ramp up their defensive intensity. Instead, the Ducks kept shooting low-percentage shots (they went 3/9 from deep in the second half) and Arizona pulled away.
Against UCLA, Oregon’s offense was flowing when they weren’t doing the same thing each time they came up the court. Sometimes they ran it through N’Faly Dante down low, and sometimes Jackson Shelstad was creating his own shot. But when the offense wasn’t flowing, it was because the team wasn’t moving as much and players were shooting tough shots that didn’t need to take.
Offensive woes aside, the Ducks are still in a rough spot. Despite improving defense being a season-long focus, the Ducks’ defense hasn’t gotten much better in the last month, and it was a big part of Oregon losing their last five games.
“We can win many more games if we were all locked in defensively,” Altman said. “I know that’s the way for consistency, year in and year out, game in and game out, you have to guard and rebound. We have not met our standard, and because of that, we are 15-7. Defensively if we don’t get things turned around here in the next five to six weeks, we’re not going to accomplish what we set out to accomplish at the start of the year. We’ll have to do with fewer numbers now, too.”
Oregon will host Washington State and Washington this week, both of whom they beat earlier this season in Pullman and Seattle. The Ducks are at a point in their season where nearly every game feels “must-win,” and these games are no different.
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