The Oregon Ducks women’s basketball team is going to look back upon this loss to Stanford and wonder “what if?”
Oregon played the Cardinal straight up in the second half, but a poor first half was enough to send the Ducks out of the Pac-12 tourney with a 76-65 loss to the Cardinal.
Coming into the game, the Ducks had a NET ranking of 19 and with this relatively close loss to the No. 1 seeded Cardinal, Oregon may have done just enough to get into the Big Dance. We won’t know if that’s the case until next weekend.
The Ducks can point to winning their three previous games before this loss, including a victory over ranked Arizona.
Te-Hina Paopao led Oregon with career-high 28 points, including going 7-of-10 from long range. Endyia Rogers added 15, but she struggled the entire day against the Stanford defense. She was 6-of-25 from the field and as a team, the Ducks were just 20-of-68 shooting as a team.
On the other side of the court, the Ducks had no answer for Cameron Brink, who almost got her second triple-double against Oregon this season. The Stanford center scored 22 points, grabbed 11 rebounds and had eight assists.
After falling down 37-24 in the first half, the Ducks got hot in the third quarter and at one point, they were within six of Stanford on Paopao’s three-pointer. But Brink came off the bench and went on a run for themselves and the deficit quickly went back to 13 by the time the quarter ended.
To the Ducks’ credit, they never let the game completely get away from them and wound up outscoring Stanford 41-39 in the second half.
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