For a seventh and likely final time Oregon will face off with UCLA’s Jaime Jaquez Jr., the Pac-12 Player of the Year, and the stakes have never been higher.
The No. 4 seed Ducks (19-13) are playing for their NCAA Tournament lives, in need of a win over top-seeded Bruins in tonight’s (6 p.m., Pac-12 Network) Pac-12 tournament semifinals to get their best victory of the season and at least enhance their resume. UCLA (28-4) is attempting to secure a No. 1 seed in the Big Dance, if not the No. 1 overall seed, and all the geographic advantages that come with it.
If UO can avoid three losses to the same opponent in a single season for just the third time in Dana Altman’s tenure it’ll earn a spot in the conference championship game, where it can remove all doubt about its postseason fate by winning the automatic bid.
“We know what we’ve got to do: We’ve got to out-rebound people and we’ve got to defend,” Altman said. “We haven’t been successful against UCLA twice because they out-rebounded us. They got us in the second half. We led both games at half and they just out-rebounded us the second half. So we’re going to have to do a better job there and we’re just going to have to have a much better second half.”
If the Ducks are going to pull off the upset they’ll have to do a much better job limiting Jaquez, who had 25 points and 12 rebounds in a win at Oregon last month. The Bruins are 17-1 when Jaquez scores at least 16 points this season.
“He’s a good player; he’s going to score here and there,” Oregon guard Rivaldo Soares said. “You got to lock in whoever has him and try to make it as hard as possible for him. He gets them going. Once he’s going that team is a different team.”
It will be a group effort to limit Jaquez, who has scored in double-figures in five meetings with Oregon but didn’t beat UO until this season.
“His game is slow ,but he can get to where he wants on the floor with great pace,” forward Nate Bittle said. “We’ve got to take that away from him, speed him up, take him out of his rhythm. … I think it’s going to be won on the defensive end. If we can lock in on the defensive end, no easy buckets for them I think we’ll like our outcome.”
Of course, UCLA has more firepower than Jaquez. Fellow senior Tyger Campbell is one of the best ball-handlers and distributors in the league and freshman Amari Bailey scored a season-high 26 points to lead the Bruins past Colorado on Thursday.
“We’ll look at the last two times we’ve played ‘em, what we can improve upon, what adjustments we can make, and try to come up with a better plan and then try to execute it a little better,” Altman said. “They’re well coached, they guard, they rebound, they know what they want offensively, and they got the most valuable player in the league. When they got in trouble at our place, he just took the game over. So we’re going to have to come up with a better plan and try to slow him down and slow the whole team down.”
