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Oregon

Dana Altman describes issues guarding Jaime Jaquez

Alex Weberby:Alex Weber•02/13/23
dana altman
(Photo by Soobum Im/Getty Images)

Oregon basketball is actually playing pretty good basketball in Pac-12 play as of late. They’ve lost just two of their last six games and both to the top-two teams in the conference in Arizona and UCLA. The issue for the Ducks in the recent pair of losses is their inability to slow down the opposing team’s stars.

Pac-12 Player of the Year front-runners Jaime Jaquez Jr. (UCLA) and Azuolas Tubelis (Arizona) both had monster games in victories over Oregon this month. The most recent of which being Jaquez, who went for 25 points and 12 rebounds in the Bruins’ win this past weekend.

After the game, Oregon head coach Dana Altman was asked about the difficulty of stopping a force as versatile as Jaquez. He answered:

“No. You just, one-on-one matchup, he beat (us). You know, he’s Player of the Year and he just he beat our guys. Now, we went small on him and I thought that helped a little bit. We slowed him down a little bit after that. But we had a little trouble with our bigs guarding.”

Jaquez is such a tough matchup because he plays with the physicality of a big man, but at just 6-foot-6 is still quick and skilled enough to beat bigger forwards off the bounce. Tubelis presented similar challenges as a traditional post scorer who can pass and run the court like a guard and put those skills on display vs. Oregon, going for 40 points on 16-21 shooting against the Ducks.

So Oregon is struggling mightily against the best players in the Pac-12 and Dana Altman is basically throwing his hands in the air at this point.

“It is a concern. And again, I’m not the smartest guy, but you see the numbers those two guys put up in those two games. So we had a hard time guarding them, you know. That’s obviously a really — it’s a team that’s had a lot of success this year from UCLA.

At the end of the day, though, Jaquez and Tubelis are Pac-12 POY front-runners for good reason…because they’re so dang hard to stop. If nobody else can stop them, it’s hard to ask Oregon to step up and be the team that figures these guys out.