Dana Altman shares story of impromptu road trip following Arizona State loss

Oregon got beat down at home Thursday night by Arizona State. It was so bad Ducks head coach Dana Altman couldn’t sleep so he took a morning road trip.

“Oh you know don’t sleep and get up Friday morning and just take off down Interstate 5,” Altman said. “I didn’t know if I was gonna stop or not. I couldn’t sleep so made it close to Roseburg. But just trying to think, clear my head, what do we got to do to get them going.”

Roseberg is about an hour drive from the Oregon campus, making it a fairly length drive for the head coach.

But the thinking he was able to do paid off in a big way Saturday. The Ducks blew the doors off No. 9 Arizona at home for what is by far it’s biggest win of the season.

“You’re disappointed in yourself when you can’t get a team to play hard,” Altman said. As a coach that’s your first responsibility. So it just drives me nuts and bothers me the most when we don’t compete. We’ve played bad before and last games but our competitiveness can’t be what it was Thursday night or the previous Thursday night against Colorado. That’s just not basketball. That’s not what we want, what we can’t have, we can’t tolerate that. That’s non-negotiable, can’t have those kinds of efforts.”

Oregon played inspired basketball Saturday. Jermaine Couisnard led the way with 27 points on 6-for-9 shooting from beyond the arc and N’Faly Dante added a double-double of 22 points and 10 rebounds.

The team as a whole was 53.1% from the field while holding the Wildcats to just a 37.5% field goal percentage.

Altman’s messaging definitely got through to the team, at least for one game.

“But how do you get that across to your team?” Altman said. “It doesn’t do any good for my staff to know it, me bark at them. It doesn’t do us any good. How do you get it across your team? I knew yelling and screaming at them wasn’t going to do it so we just talked about who are we? Challenge them a little bit with when we’ve won? When we hold people under 70, I think we’re about 90% aren’t we winning games. When we outrebound people, we’re about 90% winning games. I never claimed to be very smart, but 90% is good. If playing hard, you can accomplish those things, even if you don’t shoot it well.”

It has not been a great season so far for Oregon, who now sit at 10-8 and 4-3 in conference play halfway through January. But a victory like it just achieved can galvanize a program for weeks to come, Altman just needs to make sure his team’s swings in effort levels have reached a conclusion.

“That’s probably what I’ve been disappointed in when we don’t hit shots, we give into it,” Altman said. “That’s another sign of a poorly coached team. You don’t play hard, and you give into it, you either got a bad coach or he’s not getting through to his players. Disappointing myself because those kinds of efforts, those hurt. That hurts your program. To see them respond like that, it was great. That consistency maturity, toughness.”