The month is March, and the Oregon Ducks are playing their best basketball

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Success in sports, and especially college basketball, can sometimes boil down to hitting your stride at the right time. The Oregon Ducks certainly hit their stride last November, when they won The Players Era tournament in Las Vegas, beating two Top 25 teams along the way. But in February, when the Ducks lost five Big Ten games in a row, it seemed to many Oregon fans that the team from November was gone and the lasting memories of this season would be of unrealized potential.

But not these Ducks. These Ducks have their stride of November back — and the swagger of a team made for March.

Oregon’s 73-64 win over Indiana on Tuesday night was its sixth straight victory — a direct and convincing response to the February five-game slide. Although they sit at the middle of the Big Ten table, the Hoosiers are a talented team, and the significance of the Ducks closing a tight game on a 10-0 run after trailing with 90 seconds to play can’t be understated.

It’s clear on every Oregon player’s face when shots are falling, the crowd is going wild, and the opposing team has no choice but to put their hands together for a timeout: These Ducks are having fun. Obviously, it’s fun to win six games in a row, but the Ducks are playing with more joy than your average winning college basketball team, and it’s making an impact. The far corners of Matthew Knights Arena’s upper deck — seats that haven’t seen action in years — are full on weeknights, and the crowd is loving the show.

“We’re all going out there playing for each other,” Oregon shooting guard TJ Bamba said after the Ducks’ win over Indiana. “If (Barthelemy) is hot, we’re going to feed him. You saw that against USC. Even on a day like today when he’s not hot, and none of us were, we’re still going to preach confidence to each other. We’re always telling each other, ‘Two minutes, it’s a one point game, let’s just be killers. Forget whatever happened in the past, let’s move forward.’ I think the connectivity and the brotherhood we…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/month-march-oregon-ducks-playing-205511604.html

Author : Ducks Wire

Publish date : 2025-03-09 20:55:00

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