Oregon Ducks and Stanford Cardinal Preview
Even though this isn’t a college football matchup, tonight’s game at 9:00 ET in the Matt Court between the Oregon Ducks and Stanford Cardinal will be an important matchup in men’s college basketball. The Cardinal are 2-0 in conference play and are looking to keep the pace with California and go 13-2. They are currently the second best team in the Pac-12 when looking at overall performance this season, while the Ducks are a middle-of-the-pack team in a subpar conference (the Pac-12 is the seventh best conference in college basketball according to Sports Reference’s Simple Rating System).
I, like every other Oregon Ducks fan, is suffering from a college football withdrawal that is combined with a Rose Bowl hangover. I still want to see how Oregon would stack up against Oklahoma State to prove that our football team is better than Stanford, but this post is for next week’s featured poll. If you haven’t already, vote for this week’s poll on which team’s running backs are the best; Oregon’s or Texas A&M’s. You can vote on the blog’s sidebar or vote on the post itself here. I encourage you to read the article and comment on it voicing your opinion.
Anyway, on to tonight’s game. The Ducks are currently 10-4 and are coming off of a disappointing loss against the hated Washington Huskies. One guy to watch out for in this matchup is the uber-efficient guard Garrett Sim who leads the team with a very impressive 21.4 PER and has an incredible true shooting percentage of 72.5%. Sim is easily the team’s best offensive player right now and has been the team MVP through the first 14 games, and his only weakness right now is his defense. His usage rate of 17.5% is only the sixth-highest on the team, and Sim has been the model of efficiency thus far.
Stanford has one of the conference’s best players in forward Josh Owens, and his 24.6 PER is the third highest total in the conference. Owens is also a very good rebounder in addition to being an efficient scorer, but the production doesn’t stop with offense when looking at this star. Stanford isn’t the best offensive team in the country, but they are definitely among the best defensive teams in the country. They have eight players in the top ten in the conference in defensive rating, and Owens’s dominance on defense is shown in his 84.7 DRating that is good for 7th in the Pac-12. He also doesn’t commit many turnovers and is just as valuable on offense as he is on defense when looking at win shares.
Dwight Powell is a horrible offensive player who has a very low 10.1 PER and is worth just 0.1 wins on offense. Powell’s effective field goal percentage of 40.5% is extremely poor, but he is still one of the team’s best five players. He leads the Pac-12 with a 79.2 DRating.
What makes Stanford the second best team in the Pac is their defense, and their ability to produce more points than they allow as a roster. That sounds obvious given their record, but all 11 of their players who play in at least 70 minutes have a higher offensive rating than defensive rating. The Ducks, on the other hand, have only five players who meet those requirements.
The Ducks should be able to keep this one relatively close, but I don’t know that they can pull this one out in the end. The Cardinal hold opponents to an extremely low total of 56.4 points per game, and that’s the 14th best mark in college basketball. I don’t see how the Ducks overcome Stanford’s defense, and I have this as a 64-62 victory for the Cardinal; as much as it hurts to say it. Josh Owens will be huge in this game, and he will be the main source of offense in this contest. That’s what happens when you are one of the best players in your conference.
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