Monkey Off Back, Bears Can Continue With Season
Big, big, huge victory for Braun’s boys last night. Finally, after 3 1/2 weeks of butting heads with deeper, more talented teams, coming oh-so-close in several of those, after all the halftime leads gone to naught, the Bears finally took down a ranked team, No. 17 Oregon. They played scrappy. The took Oregon’s runs and answered right back, including closing the first half on a 17-0 run. They shut down Aaron Brooks at the end of the game and made just enough shots, feeding Ryan Anderson for the game winner.
The second half sure felt like this was going to be another one of those nights. The Bears ran to a decent halftime lead, but then saw it erased in the opening minutes of the second half. As Oregon started to build a lead, raining down open 3s, it looked as though this game would get away from the Bears, and all their hard work would be wasted, just like in Eugene, vs. USC, and in Washington last week. After all the losing, why would tonight turn out any different? Well, it seems the Bears found a little extra something. Ayinde had an off-shooting night, going 2-9, but found a way to make things happen, getting 3 assists, including the key interior pass to Anderson to score the winning basket, and a game high 12 rebounds! That’s right, 12. Aaron Brooks led the Ducks with 7, and no other Bear grabbed more than 5 boards. Crazy. And while Anderson and Christopher got most of the scoring done for the Bears, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Alex Pribble’s highly effective 12 minutes. Mostly subbing in for defense, he didn’t even attempt a field goal, but was instrumental in slowing down the Ducks, taking a couple of huge offensive charges. The Bears will miss Alex Pribble next year more than you think.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s just one win, but it’s an important one. The losing streak is halted. All the hard work has finally paid dividends. And, more importantly, if Cal can just beat OSU and ASU over the next couple weeks, they at least finish with a .500 record, which may or may not warrant an NIT bid, but would certainly be a victory of sorts after all the injury troubles the team has gone through. That is, of course, just an ‘if’; beating the Beavers on Saturday is no given, and if the Bears aren’t prepared, they’ll get run over by a team that isn’t as bad as its record.
To give you an idea of how close Cal’s margin of error is, I’ll leave you with one statistic: their Pac-10 margin of victory. In their 5 conference wins, Cal has gone to overtime twice, and won the other 3 by margins of 4, 3, and now 2. That’s right, they’re about a dozen points from being winless in the Pac-10, which suggests that they’re a lot closer to the bottom of the Pac than they might seem.
