Bears Barrage Buries Ducks
Rick Morgan 

The California Golden Bears steamrolled the Oregon Ducks 77-60 Sunday afternoon at Matthew Knight Arena.

An entertaining if inconsistent first 20 minutes of play saw the home team play well enough often enough to lead in the early going and remain within an arm's length of the Bears at the half, trailing 30-27.

Jorge Gutierrez did the damage for the Bears early, scoring 10 before the break. In the second half Gutierrez was content to run the Cal offense through Allen Crabbe - the Bear forward torched the Ducks for 23 of his career high 26 points in the second half.

Crabbe hit 9 of his 16 attempts - 6 for 8 from three land - and grabbed 12 rebounds and the Ducks had no answer whatsoever.

Gutierrez ended up with 18 points and Justin Cobbs added 15 more - a total of 59 points from the Cal backcourt.

"Their three perimeter players are as good as any in the conference and if you can't slow those three guys down, you're going to be in trouble," said Oregon head coach Dana Altman.

Oregon forward Olu Asholu agreed. "He (Crabbe) got that one open look early in the half and for a shooter, once you get that first open look the rim kind of opens up," he said.

"Unfortunately we let him get that look and then in the second half, he couldn't miss."

A rugged Bear defense held Oregon to a 38.3% shooting average, beat the Ducks on the boards 40-33 and outscored Oregon in the paint 40-20.

Guard Devoe Joseph led the Ducks in scoring with 14 points. "They're a good defensive team and they fought through screens," he said. "They made it tough for us."

Altman was clearly disappointed with Oregon's play.

"There were a number of things we needed to work on...we had the opportunities, but we gave up easy baskets," he said. "The tempo favored Cal in the second half and they had it going for them."

"We were sharp at practices, we were sharp at shoot around today. I thought we were ready after Thursday's game, Cal just had more urgency."

"We've had a couple pretty good efforts the first (game of a weekend) and have come back in the second and haven't played as well. We've got to address that. I thought we had made a big step (in the win over Stanford on Thursday) and I'm a little disappointed we didn't take another step."

"You look across the country and it's hard to make that rise (in quality of play) every over 30 games," Altman continued. "It's a process, one step forward and one step back but the good teams keep that (improvement) going."

At this point in the process Oregon is 11-5 overall and 2-2 in Pac-12 play with a road trip to Arizona State and Arizona up next. And "one step forward and one step back" pretty much describes every team in the conference to this point in the season.

The good news in that is both Altman and his team know they can play better than they did in the second half against the Bears - one of the league's better teams. The challenge in that is to avoid taking two steps backward in the desert, they will have to.