Injuries, Covid, transfers going in and out, it doesn’t matter what is thrown in Dana Altman’s way.
His Oregon teams seem to gel at just the perfect time and this year wasn’t any different.
The Ducks won the Pac-12 regular-season championship Sunday night with an 80-67 win over the Beavers in Corvallis. It clinched Oregon’s fourth title in the last six seasons.
In typical Altman style, his Ducks won this game with stingy defense and a barrage of threes.
Oregon hit 15-of-23 from long range. Shooting like that, the Ducks have the capability of beating most anybody.
Of course, they’re not going to shoot that well in every game as shooting can come and go. But the defensive effort doesn’t slump. Neither does team chemistry. Oregon has shown in the last 10 games where its gone 9-1, that it has plenty of both.
This team has completely bought into Altman’s formula of breaking down the opponent defensively and making shots they need to make, especially in the last two games against UCLA and OSU.
Nearly every defensive switch was the correct one, making it very tough for opponents to find open shots. To their credit, the Beavers did make 52 percent of their shots from the field. But they just made 4-of-17 from long range. That wasn’t nearly enough to keep up with Oregon’s 45 points thanks to three-pointers.
Ball game.
Oregon ended up 19-5 in the regular season and will surely finish with another 20-win season.
The Ducks had to play without point guard Will Richardson for the first 12 games of the year. And even when he did come back from the thumb surgery, it took the junior several games to round back into form.
N’Faly Dante blew out his ACL in December, leaving Oregon without a true center. They had two separate pauses due to Covid and the Ducks had to play an NBA type schedule towards the end of the year.
Even with all that adversity, Oregon got the job done.
Thankfully Oregon guard / forward Chris Duarte played like the conference Player of the Year, an award he will most definitely receive unless some kind of fix is in.
Assuming the Ducks win at least one game in Vegas, odds are they’ll be either a 6 or 7-seed when the NCAA tournament field is announced next Sunday. But Oregon is never satisfied. Be sure they’ll go into Vegas with the midset of winning everything.
Given the adversity this team had to overcome, only a fool would bet against these Ducks.