EUGENE — The Oregon Ducks didn’t need a buzzer-beater on Saturday.
They didn’t need 12 straight points down the stretch from Dillon Brooks, or a key defensive stop or even overtime.
They barely even needed the second half.
A home game against the No. 5 Arizona Wildcats and their 15-game winning streak was supposed to be one of the best games of the Pac-12 season.
Instead, it turned into a 27-point thumping in front of a sellout crowd that was so out of hand that Oregon fans were shouting for walk-on Charlie Noebel’s presence right around the time Arizona’s Sean Miller was finishing his halftime speech.
The No. 13 Ducks won 85-58 on Saturday, beating the Pac-12’s best team in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicated. The Ducks hit 16 three-pointers, Tyler Dorsey scored a game-high 23 points and Oregon hounded on defense with such voracity that Miller threw in the towel at the 13-minute mark of the second half as he called the Wildcats’ final timeout.
Game of the year? More like game of a lifetime for an Oregon team that handled one of the hottest teams in the country so easily that the only speed bump came in the form of the chalk thrown by the student section that delayed the game for several minutes after Oregon’s opening basket.
“Hey, the students are great,” Oregon coach Dana Altman said afterward. “But that takes away from the game and takes away from some of the enthusiasm they gave us.”
Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the only thing Altman could nitpick after a game in which the Ducks assisted on 26-of-30 field goals and shot 64 percent from three-point range.
But that’s just the type of coach Altman is. He didn’t like some spurts of the game in which Oregon’s near 40-point lead dipped into the 20s and he casually ran down a list of other areas where Oregon could have played better.
But coming off a four-game stretch in which Oregon won three games but didn’t play its best basketball, Altman will take a night in which the Ducks sank 30-of-46 attempts against a defense that entered Saturday allowing a Pac-12-best 62.7 points per game.
“They had some fun because the ball was going into the basket. That was the fun part of it,” Altman said. “You have some gratification when you’re playing really well and hard defensively. The fun part is shooting and scoring, but the toughness (on defense), that’s the gratifying thing.”
Four players on Oregon’s roster drained more than one three-pointer and six players had multiple assists. Brooks (18), Casey Benson (13) and Boucher (12) joined Dorsey in finishing with double-figure scoring.
Dorsey’s six threes on six attempts equaled his output from the last five games combined.
“Tyler is the X-factor on our team,” Brooks said. “When he gets it going, we’re blowing up teams by 20.”
Brooks, the hero on Thursday after scoring Oregon’s final 12 points in a narrow win over Arizona State, was able to watch a good portion of the Ducks’ cohesive effort from the bench. Instead of having to carry the squad, he left with eight minutes remaining in the first half after picking up his second foul and watched his team go on a 17-0 run without him.
“It was getting ridiculous,” Brooks said. “But guys feed off each other. One guy’s hot, another guy gets hot. In this game it was like five, six, seven guys that got hot.”
For Oregon, it couldn’t have come at a better time. For bragging purposes, Oregon’s win coupled with Kansas’ loss gives the Ducks the longest home winning streak in the country at 40 games. For more practical reasons, the win equals Oregon’s Pac-12 record with Arizona’s at 10-1, with the Ducks now holding the tiebreaker.
And whether the win came by 40 points or by a bucket, it was crucial for Oregon as the Ducks head out for a tough game on the road against UCLA.
“Oh, absolutely,” Altman said when asked if he felt like the Ducks needed to win out. “I told our guys we have five road games. We got a much tougher schedule. We have to win the game today or it’s over, and it would have been.”
Instead, Miller was the one having answer bigger picture questions after a projected bout between two titans turned into a knockout.
“Perspective is what’s next,” Miller said. “We’re 21-3, 10-1 in the Pac-12. We’ve played some good basketball. The team we just got beat by has an identical record. The season didn’t end. It’s not spring. This is about putting this behind us, learning from it and getting better because it happened.”
— Tyson Alger
talger@oregonian.com
@tysonalger
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