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Welcome to our new weekly basketball series, The Fast Break.
Editor’s note: I just wanted to thank everyone for the overwhelming response to yesterday’s post. The support means everything to this publication and allows us to expand some features, such as this new weekly basketball notebook from Shane Hoffmann, The Fast Break.
Thank you, again.
— Tyson
Leave it to Dana Altman to nitpick. That’s just who the Ducks’ head man is. It’s what he does best. And really, it’s that sort of leave-no-stone-unturned approach that might one day land him in the College Basketball Hall of Fame.
But boy, does he shoot straight. Ever one to temper expectations, that Altman.
N’Faly Dante returned to Oregon’s lineup in a 80-73 win over Cal Saturday night. The all-conference center hadn’t played since the Ducks’ season opener on Nov. 6, rehabilitating a knee injury for the last two-and-a-half months. Dante scored eight points, hauled in a pair of rebounds, blocked a shot, and threw down a monstrous dunk in 17 minutes.
Dana, your thoughts?
“Obviously his conditioning is not very good,” the coach said postgame.
But…
“We don’t move for him. We throw it to him and everybody’s just used to him just scoring and we all stood and watched. We put him in really bad spots.”
And those bad spots resulted in bad shots, Altman lamenting a trio of jumpers which Dante — not known for his ability to score outside of the paint — settled for throughout the evening.
But hey, Dante’s back and that’s the bottom line. And even if his outing against Cal wasn’t quite the tour-de-force that his 16-point, 21-rebound season opener was, his mere presence is a welcomed sight for a Ducks team (13-3, 5-0 Pac-12) who has brilliantly weathered a rash of early-season injuries.
Back to Altman. As he observed, and later made note of, working a marquee player back into a rotation that’s won six in a row and nine of their last 10 games is tricky, no matter his physical profile or skill set.
There’s an argument to be made, in fact, that it’s just as demanding as patching up an ailing, undermanned lineup, something Altman’s got plenty of experience with, much to his chagrin. Sophomore guard Brennan Rigsby alluded to as much after practice last week, before saying: “But that’s just basketball,” adding that, “He’s an all-American. Having one of the best players in the country on your team helps.”
As for where, specifically, it should help? Well, the Ducks finally have a rim protector and true rebounding presence inside. Freshman Kwame Evans Jr. has done admirably as a de facto small-ball center, but with the flashes have come moments of physical immaturity.
“Playing small ball around Dante is different than playing small ball around KJ,” Altman told reporters last week.
Offensively, Dante’s ability to, at minimum, draw attention, if not outright dominate the painted area could take Oregon — No. 35 nationally in adjusted offense, according to KenPom — into another stratosphere, given this group’s proficiency from beyond the arc.
To recap:
It will take some real time for Dante to become an organic fit in this rotation again.
Dante makes the Ducks better.
Both of the above statements can be true, and it should make for an intriguing subplot as the Ducks head out on their Mountain road trip later this week.
I sat down with Scott Rueck in his office in November.
The Oregon State women’s basketball head coach and I talked for 40-some minutes about the changes surrounding the university, how he stays fresh with the clipboard in hand and the trajectory of the Beavers’ program since he took the reins.
The biggest scars the pandemic left on his program, he said, were in its hampering of his ability to maintain culture that had lifted up a Pac-12 bottom-feeder and transformed it into a March mainstay. But when the cloud of Covid-19 finally began to part, the Beavers just weren’t what they had been, in all senses. They’d missed March Madness in back-to-back seasons. It was disenchanting to players, Rueck said, and he didn’t blame them one bit as some transferred out.
Then he told me that things felt different this year. That the culture seemed enlivened and everything was starting to feel normal again.
“This feels like, ‘Here we go’ mode,” he said.
It all seems to have had some merit to it, because after being picked to finish in the bottom-third of the Pac-12, his Beavers are 14-2, their two losses coming in narrow fashion to No. 5 UCLA and No. 6 USC.
“This is probably the healthiest competitive culture that I can personally remember in my coaching career, with this group,” Rueck told reporters. “Everybody can play, and if you aren’t performing, someone else will.”
It’s paved the way for stirring outcomes like the Beavers’ 73-70 overtime win over Arizona last week, and even more spirited sound bites:
“Just thinking back on other seasons,” Rueck said, “every year you think of moments, and that was a moment the other night… I think the way the team executed down the stretch, it wasn’t luck, it was created by the way that we’ve executed and learned and the way that they compete everyday. They want to be great and it’s evident. And when you’re on a mission like that, great things tend to happen for you.”
Josiah Lake Sr. didn’t play organized basketball until his junior year of high school, suiting up for his lone season on varsity the following year. He later earned an academic scholarship to Oregon State and, once on campus, tried out for the men’s basketball team.
He found his way onto the roster, playing for the Beavers from 1998 to 2000 under head coach Eddie Payne. But Lake Sr. didn’t just stick as a walk-on, he miraculously stepped into a starting role for the team during the second half of his senior year in Corvallis.
“The only reason that I was able to do that was because I had a coach who gave opportunities to the guys that showed up to play, regardless if you were a scholarship player or not,” he said. “But I also understood that I wanted an opportunity, so I had to outwork everybody that I could to try to get that chance.”
These are the types of life lessons he’s spent nearly two decades passing down to his sons Jemai, and Josiah Jr.
His eldest, Lake Jr., graduated from Tualatin High School last spring with a pair of state titles after guiding his Timberwolves to an upset of No. 1 West Linn in the 2023 state championship game. He was the state’s second-best player a year ago — behind only Jackson Shelstad — and he was nearly a casualty of the new-age recruiting landscape.
See, colleges, even locally, just haven’t been recruiting homegrown talent the way they once might’ve. Plucking proven, veteran players from the portal has been many coaches’ preference, of late.
Lake Jr. did pull in a few offers from smaller schools, but it was his dream to follow his father’s path, and one day become a Beaver.
I’m not sure either of them foresaw just how similar their paths could end up looking.
Late in the recruiting cycle last May, Oregon State finally reached out. Head coach Wayne Tinkle offered him a preferred walk-on spot. That was enough for Lake Jr., who committed shortly after.
“When the opportunity comes, it can change your life,” Lake Jr. had told me that March.
Here in mid-January, Lake Jr. has more than worked his way into the Beavers’ rotation. The 6-foot-2 speedster has appeared in all but one game this season. In 16 minutes per outing, he’s averaging 4.1 points, 2.1 rebounds, 1.8 assists and 1.2 steals. He’s shooting 56.7 percent from the field and turning the ball over a mere .5 times per game.
Lake Jr. isn’t some blossoming star you’re likely to hear about on local television. At least, not yet. And maybe he’ll never get the chance to roll out there with the starters like his dad did, but he’s rendered himself a valuable part of an energetic bench unit that’s helped swing some games for the Beavers this season.
More importantly, he’s living out his dream at his dream school in an age when fewer and fewer of these such stories come to fruition in today’s NCAA.
— Shane Hoffmann, for The I-5 Corridor
