Takeaways from Oregon Ducks women’s basketball’s 70-68 win over Arizona Wildcats
Behind some clutch shooting down the stretch from Grace VanSlooten and Sammie Wagner, and another dominant performance on the glass, the Oregon women’s basketball team defeated Arizona Sunday at Matthew Knight Arena, 70-68.
The Ducks (11-7, 2-3 Pac-12) led for nearly the entire game, owning the Wildcats (10-7, 2-3 Pac-12) on the boards, 38-19, and taking 18 more free throws.
Leading by just three points with 19 seconds left, Phillipina Kyei got a key offensive rebound and passed it out to VanSlooten, who drilled two free throws after an intentional foul to make it 70-65 with seven seconds to go.
Though the Ducks turned the ball over on back-to-back inbounds possessions, and Arizona had a shot to win it with 1.9 left, the Wildcats shot came up short and Oregon won its second Pac-12 contest with a home sweep over the Arizona schools.
Grace VanSlooten and Sammie Wagner come up big
VanSlooten finished with a team-high 19 points, including eight in the fourth quarter. Scarcely used redshirt freshman Sammie Wagner also came up with some big shots late in the game, scoring a career-high eight points, with a pair of 3-pointers made in the fourth quarter.
Kyei had another double-double with 13 points and 12 rebounds.
The Ducks got off to a good start, but let Arizona hang around in the first quarter with seven turnovers and just seven shot attempts. Oregon led 12-6 and held the Wildcats to 3-of-11 shooting from the field.
Turnovers an issue for the Ducks
The turnovers didn’t cease in the second quarter, but the shots continued to fall as Gray got hot from deep. The sophomore led the Ducks with 11 first-half points and was 3-for-3 from deep. Gray’s play helped the Ducks take a 34-27 lead into the halftime break, despite 13 first half turnovers.
Four more turnovers by the Ducks in the opening minutes of the second half helped Arizona trim the lead to just three. From then, the Oregon defense got back on track and helped the Ducks take a double-digit lead early in the fourth, 52-41.
Though the Ducks closed the game out, they finished with 27 total turnovers, the most in a game in Graves’ 10 years in Eugene.
Oregon will take on a ranked Stanford squad in Palo Alto for its next game on the road Friday.
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: Takeaways from Oregon women’s basketball’s 70-68 win over Arizona
