Oregon women's basketball drops 8th-straight as USC's JuJu Watkins scores 33 points
The Oregon women’s basketball team dropped its eighth-straight game and its third-straight in blowout fashion in an 88-51 defeat to No. 10 USC Friday at Matthew Knight Arena.
After containing Trojan superstar freshman JuJu Watkins in their first meeting in January, the Ducks could not stop the phenom Friday. Watkins scored 33 points and outscored the Ducks in the first half by herself with 24 points.
“She’s incredible. She’s a really, really good player,” Oregon coach Kelly Graves said. “It’s great that she’s in our conference and we get to compete against players like that … she could play in the league right now. She’s that good, that poised, that savvy.”
Oregon continues losing slump
The loss drops the Ducks to 11-15 and 2-11 in the Pac-12 play. Ten of the Ducks’ first 13 opponents have been ranked, including the last six in a row. Oregon plays one more ranked team on Sunday in No. 9 UCLA before playing the unranked Washington schools on the road next week.
After scoring the first basket, the Ducks were on the wrong end of a 19-0 spurt by the Trojans, spearheaded by 14 first quarter points from Watkins. Graves said one of Oregon’s biggest issues this season has been stopping those runs.
“We were on our heels a little bit offensively early,” he said. “We have to answer. We’ve been unable to score … that’s been one of our big issues, we haven’t been able to answer.”
USC scores 37 against Ducks
The Trojans rocketed out to a 57-21 lead at the halftime break. After Oregon responded with a strong, 21-13 advantage in the third quarter, the Trojans outscored the Ducks 18-9 in the final frame.
USC’s 37-point margin of victory is its largest against Oregon, and the most since the 1980s.
Friday’s loss marked the third in a row by at least 22 points.
“The reality is we’re not as good as these teams,” Graves said. “For a team this young and this injured and quite frankly not as deep as we’d like to be, it’s a challenge. This schedule has been a challenge. No one has gone through a gauntlet like this, no one in the country.”
The Ducks take on No. 9 UCLA at 2 p.m. Sunday back at Matthew Knight Arena.
Alec Dietz covers University of Oregon football, volleyball, women’s basketball and baseball for The Register-Guard. You may reach him at adietz@registerguard.com and you can follow him on Twitter @AlecDietz.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Pac-12 women's basketball: JuJu Watkins, USC Trojans down Oregon Ducks
