Dana Altman details Oregon's issues shutting down top Pac-12 players

Considering the talent across college basketball, it’s really hard to stop an opposing best team’s best player night in and night out. Still, considering what some of the Pac-12’s best have done to Oregon as of late, it has Dana Altman worried.

Altman spoke on that fact after Jaime Jaquez put up 25 points and 12 rebounds on the Ducks in UCLA’s win in Eugene this weekend. He said it’s very obvious that slowing down top competition is a problem at the moment for his team.

“It is a concern. It is a concern,” said Altman. “Again, I’m not the smartest guy but, if you see the numbers those two guys put up in those two games? We had a hard time guarding them.”

The question was specifically focused on Jaquez as well as Azuolas Tubelis at Arizona who scored 40 points inside Matthew Knight Arena. However, this has been a trend for the Ducks all year in league play.

Boogie Ellis at USC as well as Mouhamed Gueye at Washington State each put up 19 on Oregon. From there, though, Oregon State’s Dexter Akanno scored 20, Arizona State’s Desmond Cambridge Jr. hung 21, and Colorado’s Tristan Da Silva dropped 30 in the first game and then 23 in the second game.

Altman’s defense has been okay throughout the Duck’s season where they now sit at 15-11. Even so, they’ll need to find better success getting stops against the league’s best as they wrap up the regular season and try to survive in the conference tournament.

Altman describes issues guarding Jaime Jaquez

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-runner Jaime Jaquez Jr. was the latest to have a monster game in a victory over Oregon this month. 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.”