Revenge Royale: Women’s basketball travels to Oregon
The Trojans have not had much success with both Oregon schools on the road.
By THOMAS JOHNSON
This away stretch might make or break the season.
The Oregon schools have not been kind to USC women’s basketball when not playing at Galen Center. The Trojans have lost their last two games against the Oregon schools away from home and 10 of their past 11 such games.
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USC’s (18-4, 8-4 Pac-12) most recent game against Oregon State (20-3, 9-3) away from the safe confines of home came in the Pac-12 Women’s Basketball Tournament last season. The 11th-seeded Beavers crushed the sixth-seeded Trojans’ chances of making a deep run with their 8-point upset win.
“Out of mind, out of sight,” said redshirt sophomore guard Taylor Bigby in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “We’re definitely just focused on every next game. So we’re just going in worried about Friday, and then we’ll worry about Sunday when we get there.”
The Trojans never seemed to recover from the disappointing result, falling to a lower seed in the NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament and again losing to a team they were favored to beat.
Now USC has a chance to redeem itself in Eugene on Friday against the Oregon Ducks (11-14, 2-10) and then in Corvallis on Sunday. The road always poses a tough task in the Pac-12, though.
“It’s hard. We know how hard it is for teams to play here,” said graduate guard Kayla Padilla in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “It’s the same situation for us when we go there. But I think it just brings out, it has to bring out another side of us, a little bit more [of a] tougher side.”
Oregon — a team with a mere two conference wins this season — poses a much easier task for USC than the back end of the road trip. One of those two Pac-12 wins for the Ducks came against Arizona (12-12, 4-8) by 2 points on Jan. 14, a team USC just took down by a margin of 17.
The Ducks have not won a game since that Jan. 14 affair, riding a seven-game losing streak where they’ve lost by an average of 16.6 points. Six of those losses have come against ranked teams, but USC — ranked No. 10 in the most recent Associated Press Top 25 Women’s College Basketball Poll — will pose that same problem.
One Trojan will have extra motivation against Oregon: Bigby spent her freshman year with the Ducks.
“I don’t really have any ill will or anything, but I feel like it feels good going there,” Bigby said. “[I] went there last year, I had a good time. It’s always a pleasure to see some of my old teammates, old coaches.”
While no win in the Pac-12 is an easy one — USC’s loss to an unranked Washington (13-10, 3-9) earlier this season proves that — the Trojans will have a much easier time against the Ducks than in their Sunday matchup.
Just as the Ducks have not won since mid-January, the Beavers have not lost since Jan. 21. Oregon State has four ranked wins as part of its five-game winning streak to move to No. 11 in the AP Poll, posting the second-best scoring defense in the Pac-12.
At first glance, it would seem that the Trojans will have to move away from their strength in this one — their 3-point shooting — as the Beavers also post the best 3-point defense in the conference. But when USC played Oregon State this season — albeit over a month ago and at Galen Center — the Trojans won and shot better from deep than their season average.
Padilla was at the forefront, making four of USC’s six buckets from downtown on 80% efficiency.
“We really capitalize on the type of defense they played,” Padilla said. “We have so many weapons that, once you take away something, someone else is open. And I felt like last game [against Oregon State], that person was me, I was the beneficiary of that. So I think if we continue to move the ball and have multiple guards on the floor, no type of defense can get us off that.”
The Trojans are just now starting their stretch run — with only six games left in the regular season — and every game matters as USC looks to avoid another late-season collapse, particularly at the hands of Oregon State.
With the way the NCAA tournament is structured, the top-16 seeds get to host the first two rounds of the tournament at their home arenas. If the Trojans hold off the Oregon onslaught for the next two games, the odds of them hosting more games at Galen Center — other than the final two allotted on the regular season schedule — can only increase.
“We’re trying to take it one game at a time, one practice at a time,” Padilla said. “But [Head] Coach Lindsay [Gottlieb] has constantly mentioned we’re not just trying to win games, not just trying to get to the top of the Pac, but have the opportunity to host here, which I think would be super awesome for us.”
USC travels up north to dabble with the Ducks at Matthew Knight Arena on Friday at 7 p.m., and battles with the Beavers at Gill Coliseum on Sunday at noon.
