Rush The Court

Last month we introduced our new project, which is centered around determining the top YouTube moment in Pac-12 basketball history. We continue the nomination portion with Oregon State.

[ed note: These are just the top moments we could find on YouTube, which has a vast number and array of videos, but we won’t be able to cover the entire 99 years of the conference.]

We open with perhaps the most explosive dunk in Beavers basketball history, courtesy of shooting guard Jared Cunningham. With three minutes left in the opening week of conference play, Oregon State was hanging onto a two-point lead against vaunted Arizona. Getting a running start from the three-point line, Cunningham read Joe Burton’s missed jumper perfectly, rising over a pair of Wildcats and one of his own teammates to slam the ball home one-handed. If you were watching the game live, you’ll remember how officials just stopped the game for a good 20 seconds because no one was quite sure what they just witnessed. There was no foul or timeout called, everyone just stopped playing. I thought that was pretty cool. If the Beavers wouldn’t have pulled the upset, then the play would have just been remembered as a nice moment in an otherwise tough loss. But the offense continued to thrive down the stretch, and by the end of the night the Beavers were tied atop the league standings and owned the #6 play of the day on SportsCenter.

Our next clip can be viewed as one of the turning points in recent Beavers hoops history, lifting the program from the abysmal lows it suffered during the Jay John era. Going into the first USC game of Craig Robinson’s initial season in Corvallis, Oregon State had lost 21 consecutive Pac-10 games. Roeland Schaftenaar played a huge role in changing that, draining a three-pointer off a nifty pick and roll with less than a second remaining to force overtime. The Beavers would go on to win, 62-58, a victory that would get the team rolling all the way to a CBI Championship in early April.

Up by one with 45 seconds remaining in the 325th battle of the Civil War, Beavers guard Chris Stephens drove to the basket looking to guarantee a win, or at least a trip to overtime, for his team. The attempt was too hard, and then something happened that will go down in Oregon State basketball lore. Sasa Cuic, along with two Ducks, swiped at the rebound, deflecting the ball high off the glass and into the hoop. Maarty Leunen knocked down two free throws at the other end to cut the deficit back to one, and after a pair of makes from the stripe for Stephens, Chamberlain Oguchi missed two three-point attempts to send the game to an extra five minutes. One rimmed out, the other was badly off, and seconds later the Beaver Dam rushed the court to celebrate the rivalry win on Senior Day.

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Voting closes a week from now, and the top vote-getter advances to the tournament of champions.