“People quickly forget,” Kelly Graves says, “we’re the ones that set the bar here.”

Welcome to The I-5 Corridor’s State of the Hardwood series, where we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the men’s and women’s basketball programs at Oregon and Oregon State throughout the summer. Today we begin with the Oregon women’s basketball team, which has gone through a drastic rebuild this spring as the team attempts to pull out of a nose dive.

EUGENE — Kelly Graves would like you to remember how we got here.

That dreadful 11-21 season this winter? He didn’t like it any more than you did. It’s also an acute outlier that has earned such a distinction because of the belief Graves has cultivated — and expectations he’s constructed — around Eugene over the last decade.

“People quickly forget,” he told the I-5 Corridor last week, “we’re the ones that set the bar here.”

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Tyson Alger covered the Ducks for The Oregonian and The Athletic before branching out on his own to create and run The I-5 Corridor. He brings more than a decade of experience on the University of Oregon sports beat. He has covered everything from Marcus Mariota’s Heisman Trophy-winning season to the Ducks’ first year in the Big 10.