Ducks Basketball

Well for a season that started out with such promise on the Men's side it is now starting to show the signs of weakness. After going 6-1 in Pac-10 play the ducks are now 8-5 and just can't seem to put games together again. I'm hoping this is just a slump and not a sign of things to come. Aaron Brooks just scored less then 15 points this last weekend when coming into the weekend he was the Pac-10 leading scorer. Ugh hopefully the team will sweep in the Bay Area, a tough thing to do, and then run the table at home against UW, WSU and OSU. The biggest problem I see is sometimes they just get into a rut offensivly where they don't move well without the ball or put up unwarrented shots. Sometimes those shots go in and it makes me even madder!! I don't care if you make a bad shot it was still a bad shot and making it will only encourage. The team moves the ball well when they want and we have the team speed to move well without the ball to get good wide open looks at the basket from about 10+ feet out or a quick dash to the hoop to take the feed. However for some reason we don't do this on a consistent basis. From a coaching standpoint I'm still not sure why we aren't pressing the whole game. The team worked hard on the offseason to make sure they got in great condition. Our bigs run the floor well and I think if we full court press the whole game we'd probably be winning all these close games by 15 or more. On defense our biggest problem is not blocking people out and not getting any over the back calls. But if the refs aren't calling that you have to make sure you block everyone out and go up strong to get the ball as it's coming down. Against many of the Pac-10 teams we should not be getting out rebounded with Marty, Malik and everyone else in the post position. Teams like Stanford will because of the amount of size they have on the team. But teams like Arizona give me a break we are bigger then they are. Oh well just have a few more weeks before the Pac-10 tournament. We need to go at max of 1 loss until then to get the team confidence back. I think the Pac-10 tournament if we can get to the final game that will bode well for the NCAAs. In the NCAAs we'll at our current rate bow out by the second round. If we can get the swagger back we could push into the elite eight again. Well only time will telll.

As for the Duck women I'm not sure what is going on but I'm thinking many people are wishing that the admin didn't bow to the players wishes and would have done everything in their power to make Jody Runge stay. Bev Smith is a good coach but for whatever reason she just doesn't get as much out of her players as Runge did. Now Bev is definitely more popular with her players then Runge ever was but then again you don't need to like someone to play for them especially when you are a Pac-10 powerhouse. I still have hope that Bev can pull in a great group of talent and get them to play ball as she wants. But I don't think fans nor admin will wait much longer before moving on.