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Dillon Brooks' last-second 3-pointer dooms UCLA to its first loss
One month after an underwhelming start to the season sent Oregon plummeting out of the top five in the polls, the Ducks showed signs they may yet evolve into the elite team they were supposed to be.
They rode the brilliance of preseason All-American Dillon Brooks on Wednesday night to maybe the biggest win in the brief history of Matthew Knight Arena.
Brooks scored a season-high 23 points and sank the game-winning shot in Oregon’s thrilling 89-87 victory over previously unbeaten second-ranked UCLA. With the Ducks trailing by a point and the final seconds melting away, Brooks curled around a Jordan Bell screen, pulled up from just right of the top of the key and buried a contested go-ahead 3-pointer with only eight tenths of a second left.
Just to set the stage for Brooks’ game winner, Oregon had to surge back from eight points down with about three minutes to play. UCLA’s Bryce Alford could have extended the Bruins’ lead to three prior to Oregon’s final possession, but the 87 percent foul shooter missed the front end of a 1-and-1 with 15 seconds to go, giving Brooks the chance he’d been craving.
“It feels amazing,” Brooks said on ESPN2 immediately after the game. “Sold out crowd. No. 2 team in the building. I really wanted to get off on the right foot in the Pac-12, and we were able to do it.”
Brooks’ dramatic 3-pointer was a fitting conclusion to an entertaining, back-and-forth game with unusually high stakes for late December.
On one bench at Matthew Knight Arena sat an Oregon team that won the Pac-12 last season. On the other bench at Matthew Knight Arena sat a UCLA team projected to supplant the Ducks as conference champs.
By handing UCLA its first loss of the season, Oregon sent a message that it should not be dismissed as a Pac-12 title contender just yet. The Ducks looked more like the team they were projected to be before the season than they have at any other point the past seven weeks.
With Brooks recovering slowly from offseason foot surgery, Chris Boucher missing time with an ankle injury and two new starters playing in the backcourt, Oregon did not jell as quickly as expected. They shot poorly from the perimeter and struggled to take care of the ball, losing by 17 at Baylor on Nov. 15, staggering to a fifth-place finish at the Maui Invitational a week later and eking out some closer-than-expected wins since then.
The one silver lining for Oregon is that Dana Altman’s teams have tended to peak in March, not November or December. For example, last year’s Ducks lost to UNLV and Boise State in non-conference play and dropped their Pac-12 opener to Oregon State by double digits before going on a late-season run that propelled them to a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
Duplicating that second-half surge seems more plausible now after watching Oregon overcome a 15-0 second-half UCLA run and match the nation’s most high-powered offense basket for basket.
Freshman point guard Payton Pritchard sank a trio of big 3-pointers, dished out nine assists and only committed one turnover. Boucher also returned from his ankle injury and hit a key 3-pointer to start Oregon’s game-ending 15-5 surge. But the biggest positive was the play of Brooks, who finally seems to have regained his rhythm and explosiveness after sitting out five months while recovering from offseason foot surgery.
Brooks didn’t start until Oregon played UNLV in Portland earlier this month, didn’t have his minutes restriction lifted until the last couple games and didn’t duplicate last season’s versatile production until Wednesday night. He attempted 20 shots and made nine of them while also chipping in nine rebounds, four assists and two steals.
More performances like that from Brooks could go a long way toward injecting life into Oregon’s offense. If Brooks reemerges as a go-to threat, he’ll draw attention from opposing defenses and create better looks for Boucher, Pritchard and Tyler Dorsey.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him atdaggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
