LAS VEGAS — After a feeble start, Oregon took a two-point lead over UCLA with just over 10 minutes to go in the first half when Johnathan Loyd drilled a three-pointer. Having snatched the advantage, Loyd & Co. refused to give it back to the Bruins, riding the surplus to a 78-69 win in the Pac-12 Tournament final.
For the third game in a row, too, Damyean Dotson was a hot shooter in the first half, which was combined with a surprising offensive performance from Loyd, giving the Ducks a halftime lead. Loyd carried his scoring swagger into the second portion of play, and in his hometown of Las Vegas, he led his team to an upset win over the top seed in the bracket.
“This is an amazing feeling,” he said. “To do this in front of my family, my friends, hometown — it’s just an amazing feeling.”
The Bruins, who came back from deficits of 15 and 11 in the second halves of their last two games, continued to probe the Ducks’ advantage into the fading moments of the matchup. But Dotson scored his first points of the second half on a long two-point swoosh with 2:36 to go, and the nine-point lead proved to be insurmountable.
The Ducks out-rebounded UCLA 4-0 and blocked them twice in the final two and half minutes. Up by 10 with under 30 seconds to play, Loyd sent up a floater that went awry late in the shot clock — but Carlos Emory slammed in the miss, providing the snapshot of Oregon’s impressive win over UCLA.
Loyd earned the Pac-12 Tournament MVP honors, and Dotson and Arsalan Kazemi were named to the all-tournament team. Loyd delivered a career-high 19 points along with three assists and two steals. Emory was the Ducks’ top scorer with 20, while Dotson had 13 and Kazemi scored 12.
“(Loyd) was on a roll, and he felt it tonight,” Oregon head coach Dana Altman said. “There were a couple that I said ‘What are you doing?’ and he looked at me and nodded his head and said, ‘I know that was a bad one Coach, but I’m on fire.’”
The tournament victory will boost Oregon in Sunday’s NCAA Tournament bracket seeding, potentially reversing their resume-hurting and regular-season ending losses.
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The Ducks could not have been more out of sorts to open the ball game. In the first five and half minutes of play, they turned the ball over seven times and were blocked three times in the paint. Oregon players were visibly upset with themselves and each other, screaming at one another during the messy stretch. Down 10-4 at the first media timeout, Altman laid into his team, letting them know while slamming papers to the ground that their then-current performance wouldn’t cut it.
The players responded. Down 14-6, they yanked the momentum away from the Bruins and went on a scoring tear. The Ducks would score six baskets, five of them threes, exploding to a 23-18 lead with 7:47 left in the half.
With just over a minute on the first half clock, Dominic Artis found Emory on a long lob pass, allowing him to lay in a backwards basket at the rim. As he has the tendency to do, Emory followed one big play with another, draining a three on his team’s next possession, to push the lead to 11, the largest of the first half.
At the break, Oregon led 41-32. The squad in green and yellow shot 7-for-9 from three-point and Emory, Dotson and an offensively red-hot Loyd combined for 35 of Oregon’s 41 first-half points.
“I’ve just been hitting shots,” Dotson said. “So, I just keep shooting.”
UCLA was quick to jump back into the game, slicing Oregon’s lead to three in less than five minutes of play in the second half. The Ducks held steady, however, and after the advantage had slipped to just two points, Loyd delivered a floating lob to Tony Woods for a pretty alley-oop and a nine-point lead at 62-53. The dunk was part of an 8-0 run.
The closest the showdown got from there was six points before a strong late push from the Ducks capped the win.
The Ducks shot 47.5 percent on the game and out-rebounded their opponent 35-27.
For the third game in a row, UCLA’s Shabazz Muhammad was held below his scoring average, as he managed 14. Larry Drew II also had 14.
Oregon blew its chance for a regular season title, a crown they let tumble to UCLA. But when it came down to head-to-head to decide the conference’s elite program, Oregon came out on top for the first time in this bracket since 2007.
“A week ago this time I think it’s safe to say that we were as probably as low as we could get,” Altman said. “But we bounced back. I think it showed a little bit of the character of our team.”