"First of all, that's not how senior day is supposed to go," said Dana Altman of his team's 88-71 loss to the Stanford Cardinal Saturday afternoon at Matthew Knight Arena.
His voice worse for the wear, Altman continued. "I feel really bad for Joevan and Jay-R. Defensively this weekend we just didn't play. We didn't dictate anything defensively."
"... a lot of the things we were doing well earlier ... we just didn't do."
The team Oregon defeated on the road a month ago returned the favor in spades, pounding the Ducks on the glass, in the paint and on the scoreboard.
For the opening 10:00 minutes the day was following the preferred script, Oregon jumped to a quick 8-0 lead then seemed mostly on track taking the lead to 18-13 only to have the Cardinal suddenly begin to dismantle Oregon piece by piece.
Stanford's Josh Owens - on his way to 31 points and 11 boards - splatted a three from a different zip code to get things started, Aaron Bright and Jeremy Green quickly did likewise.
Although Garret Sim and Jay-R Strowbridge would each make a three to remain within arm's reach of the visitors, the Cardinal spent the rest of the half pushing Oregon off the defensive boards to covert second chance opportunities and pushing the Ducks into turnovers and missed shots at the offensive end.
Much of the reason for the rasp in Altman's voice was the ongoing conversation he held with the game officials. A number of whistles that raised eyebrows - and perhaps an equal number of whistles that weren't blown - opened the matter up for discussion for most of the afternoon.
Stanford took full advantage and left the Ducks with nothing to show for their last home stand of the season and a subdued post game celebration for seniors Joevan Catron and Jay-R Strowbridge.
Malcolm Armstead's 22 points led the Ducks with Strowbridge hitting for 16. Jonathon Loyd - who added 11 - lost his starting spot to Armstead when assistant coach Josh Jamison erroneously entered the wrong name in the official line-up and Altman chose to not make the correction and start the game with a technical foul.
Ironically perhaps, Joevan Catron later did receive a technical foul in the aftermath of one of the many tempests Altman and the game officials weren't seeing in the same light.
The Ducks were a respectable 44% from the floor in the opening 20 minutes, but staggered to an 11-35 effort in the second, finishing at 36.7% for the night.
Stanford? In the process of building a 15 rebound margin (36-21) the Cardinal warmed up shooting nearly 55% before the break and buried the Ducks after, hitting 15-23 (65.2%) to end up at 59.3%. Add eight blocked shots to the mix and it just wasn't a very good day across the board.
"We didn't put bodies on bodies to eliminate the height that they have," said Loyd. "When you don't do that you let them use their height, that was what was wrong today."
The loss drops Oregon's record to 7-9 in conference and greatly decreases the odds of an opening day bye in the Pac-10 tournament.
Before then the Ducks head to Arizona State and Arizona to finish conference play.
"We learned from these two games, we've got to get ready for Arizona State" said Strowbridge looking ahead. "We need to sharpen up offensively and lock down defensively. So now we've just got to continue to move forward and get ready."
