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QuickTake:
Already a Big Ten Tournament long shot, the Ducks sank just three baskets in the first half of their 70-60 season-ending loss to Maryland.
CHICAGO — Inside Oregon’s locker room, a tired and pensive Kwame Evans Jr. didn’t mince words.
Oregon’s one-and-done at the Big Ten Tournament?
“We were all out of sorts,” said the Oregon junior. “We really didn’t come to play until the second half.”
Count that as the understatement of the year. On paper, Oregon’s 70-60 season-ending loss to Maryland doesn’t look that bad. The Ducks were beaten much worse in this season — and they did manage to pull a one-time 24-point deficit back into single digits in the game’s final minutes.
But ultimately, it still ended in a 10-point loss to the tournament’s No. 17 seed, which went 12-20 this season. The first half saw Oregon hit three shots — all by Nate Bittle — in the game’s opening 20 minutes.
“When you get that far down,” Evans said, “it’s a long way back to the top.”
Don’t the Ducks know.
The Ducks used to do their best work this time of year. Ten years ago to the day, the Ducks beat Washington in Las Vegas to advance to the semifinals of the Pac-12 Tournament, where they would beat Arizona and then Utah in front of a packed house to claim the second conference tournament of the Dana Altman era.
Oregon won 31 games that year and advanced to the Elite Eight. They improved to 33 wins and a Final Four appearance a year later. Every season since then, the Ducks have reached at least 20 wins.
The Ducks ended this season with 12. Tuesday could have been viewed as a mercy killing if it wasn’t for the torturous 20 minutes of basketball the roughly 100 Oregon fans at the United Center in Chicago had to sit through.
In trouble from the start
And it’s not that Maryland was that good — the Terrapins shot 38% in the first half — but that didn’t matter much when the Ducks took 15 minutes and 11 seconds to score their first bucket.
“You do this 46 years, there are probably a couple (games like that),” Altman said. “But (shooting) 3 for 22? I’m not sure about that.”
Oregon wasn’t supposed to win this tournament. The Ducks came in with a banged-up roster, zero at-large NCAA Tournament hopes and a +30000 betting line from Vegas to win the six required games in six days. Even the best teams of Altman’s career would find that challenging.
But even though Oregon had already beaten Maryland this year, and came into the game as a 4.5-point favorite, it was the Terrapins’ band who might have seen Tuesday coming before anyone else. As Oregon warmed up in front of the Maryland band in an otherwise empty United Center, band members tracked anytime the Ducks missed successive shots. It didn’t take long until the band was hooting, hollering and celebrating Oregon’s seventh consecutive “BRICK!”
Then the game started and the Ducks one-upped their warmup by missing their first 11 shots.
“We just didn’t come out ready,” said Bittle, who in his last game as a Duck scored 16 points, shot 47% from the floor and managed seven of Oregon’s 19 buckets in the game. “They jumped on us early. We tried to fight back but it wasn’t enough.”
Questions surround next year
Evans and Bittle sat next to Altman during a postgame press conference attended by one writer. Their presence seemed to pain the coach.
“Really disappointed for these two,” Altman said, motioning to the pair. “They tried to keep us in it all year.”
The two were part of a three-player Oregon core that brought with it such high expectations this season. Bittle was a preseason All-Big Ten selection. Evans was Oregon’s spark off the bench last year during its run to the NCAA Tournament. And then there was Jackson Shelstad, the Portland native who averaged 13.7 points per game as a sophomore and spent the last two months of his junior year on the bench with a broken hand.
Shelstad was here on Tuesday — before the game he sat on the bench with a ball in his hands. And as Oregon’s locker room opened up for postgame interviews, he was the first one to leave.
“The bus this way?” Shelstad asked an usher before making a line for the exit.
Will he be back next year? Altman doesn’t know. He said the same about Wei Lin and the rest of the roster that will lose four seniors to graduation and likely a bevy of underclassmen to the portal.
“We’ll meet after the season with all the players,” Altman said. “Obviously, things have got to change with all the players. There has to be a commitment to the team and coming back, working their tail off.”
Altman acknowledged his own need to change, too.
“Mentally, we weren’t prepared. We didn’t have any fire. We didn’t have any bounce,” he said. “That’s on me as much as it is them. It’s my job to get them ready to play, and we weren’t ready to play.
“But they did fight back at least, and I will give them credit for that.”
Altman said he needed to recruit better and shift his transfer portal focus this offseason to target more experienced players. What he’ll be selling to potential candidates remains to be seen.
Even if healthy this season, Oregon would have likely been a mid-range Big Ten team. This isn’t Ducks football. There’s not a roster waiting in Eugene that’s just one or two pieces away from a championship run — heck, one Oregon official estimated the over/under on players returning next year to be 2.5. There’s not a coach on the rise, or a team that’s going to have any feel for itself once practice begins again next fall.
The one thing it will have, though, is Sean Stewart. The 6-foot-9 junior transferred to Oregon last year from Ohio State. He wanted to become a better player. He wanted to play for Altman. He wanted to play Big Ten Tournament games on nights that weren’t reserved for the 16 and 18 seeds — like Tuesday night was in the first year of this expanded Big Ten field.
“I’m going to work super hard this summer to make sure we don’t have what happened this year happen again,” Stewart said. “I believe in Altman and the plan he has for me.”
