Oregon locked up a bid to the NCAA Tournament on Saturday in its upset win over Arizona, and six Seniors played their final game at Matthew Knight Arena in the process. We break them down below:

It’s Been An Up And Down Season For Senior Mike Moser, But The Forward Has Averaged 17.7 PPG Over His Last Seven Games To Propel The Ducks Onto The Right Side Of The Bubble. (Michael Shaw/AP)

Hopes were high when Mike Moser announced his intentions to transfer from UNLV to Oregon last summer, and expectations immediately rose for the Ducks. There were talks before of a top-four finish to follow up their Sweet Sixteen appearance, but with the addition of Moser, competing with Arizona for a conference championship seemed achievable. And for the first two months of the season, things were great. The forward dropped 15 points in the first game of the season against Georgetown, and added another 24 in a huge road win in overtime at Mississippi. The Ducks were riding high, but the losses began to accumulate rapidly as Moser’s production waned. He hit a nasty shooting slump and lost all confidence while Oregon dropped six of seven games in the month of January, but as he slowly began to get his stroke back, Dana Altman‘s team finally started to pull out the close games that they had been losing before. They are now a lock for the NCAA Tournament, and it’s no coincidence that Moser has averaged 16.8 PPG since February 8, a stretch where his team has gone 7-1.

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In what was a very entertaining night of basketball around the Pac-12, here are a number of semi-interesting thoughts for Thursday’s five games.

Oregon 70, Utah 68 (OT)

Despite A Step Up In Competition, Delon Wright Continues To Produce Across the Board (George Frey, AP)

• Plenty of words have already been spent dissecting Utah’s final possessions in regulation and then in overtime, but those two possessions took up about two percent of the entire game. There is more to be gleaned from the other 98-ish percent. So let’s spend some time digging into that game. The biggest question coming into it was: “So, are the Utes really any good?” Well, Utah answered that question with a resounding: “I dunno. Maybe!?! Probably?!? Aw, who knows?” Delon Wright wasn’t as athletically dominant against more worthy competition, but still wound up with 14 points, six boards, four blocks, a couple steals and dimes. And, if anything, he was underused. Oregon got the memo about his unreliable jumper and often backed off him, went under screens, and dared him to knock down jumpers, which he did on a couple of occasions. But that’s still far preferable to letting him get to the rim, which he can do against all but the most capable defenders.
• Elsewhere, Dallin Bachynski really answered the call in the middle (despite that unfortunate play at the end, which can hardly be blamed on him) and was probably the best big on the court throughout the game, something that wasn’t expected.
• While the Utes played very well as a whole, Jordan Loveridge was not at his best Thursday night, settling for jumpers too often and, worse yet, settling for long jumpers; he took six of his 23 shots from three-point land and made just one of them. While Loveridge is capable inside and out, he relied far too much on his outside game and shunned the inside portion. Perhaps some of this was part of a game plan to keep Mike Moser from being an interior defensive presence, but there were too many times where Loveridge floated to the three-point  line while Wright was clearly trying to set up a post feed.

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The Pac-12 opened the 2013-14 season with a big splash in South Korea and ended with a head-scratching upset in Corvallis. Let’s take a closer look at how the conference fared through the first three days of the regular season.

Young, A Transfer Out Of Houston, Made His Case For Newcomer Of The Year In The Pac-12 After A Stellar Opening Night Performance Against Georgetown. (credit: Lee Jim-man)

Best Game – Oregon vs Georgetown: The stage couldn’t have been bigger. A top 20 Oregon team, missing two of its starters after receiving suspensions earlier in the week, against a good Georgetown club, being played in South Korea on ESPN at the Armed Forces Classic. The Ducks jumped out to a 19-9 lead on the Hoyas before they finally found their offense, but Georgetown eventually settled down and got a Mikael Hopkins jumper with 10 seconds remaining in the first half to pull within three. Oregon held onto a lead for the final 15 minutes of the game, but each time it looked as if it would pull away, Georgetown would come up with a big stop to stay within striking distance. The dagger came with two and a half minutes to play, as senior Richard Amardi slammed home a dunk to end a mini-Hoya run, putting the Ducks up 73-68. Junior guard Joseph Young led Oregon with 24 points and five rebounds.

Upsets – Only one, but it was a biggie. Coppin State, who was picked to finish ninth in the MEAC, went into Corvallis without its best player and topped Oregon State, 78-73. The Beavers, of course, were without two of their starting forwards, Devon Collier and Eric Moreland, so the loss may not be held against Craig Robinson‘s team if they are in the mix for an NCAA bid come March (assuming they’re in the mix at all). But regardless, this was a pathetic performance turned in by the Beavers. Except for a brief spurt of points from center Angus Brandt late in the second half, the only source of offense came from senior Roberto Nelson, who scored a career-high 36 points.

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Can you believe it? Games! Actual games! And tomorrow! We’re excited too, so Big East correspondent Brian Otskey (@botskey) and Pac-12 writer Andrew Murawa (@AMurawa) teamed up to offer this breakdown of one of opening night’s most buzzworthy games: Oregon vs. Georgetown in South Korea.

Georgetown will win if… It controls tempo, dominates the paint and takes advantage of Oregon’s misfortune. The Hoyas would love nothing more than to play a conservative, halfcourt game where Oregon’s athleticism and quickness can be neutralized. Fortunately for John Thompson III’s team, that is something they have done very well over the years. Hallmarks of Georgetown basketball are strong defense and offensive discipline, two strengths that can do significant damage to Oregon’s chances. It is a fairly safe bet to count on point guard Markel Starks to control the ball and run the offense efficiently. Starks turned the ball over just two times per game last year, bad news for a Ducks team that thrives in the open court and was one of the more athletic teams in the entire nation. With Dominic Artis and Ben Carter suspended, along with Damyean Dotson and Mike Moser possibly not at 100% (injury-related), Georgetown is primed to shut down Oregon’s primary strength and take advantage of Dana Altman’s misfortune. The Ducks are light in the frontcourt aside from center Waverly Austin and Moser so this is a prime opportunity for Josh Smith to show a national audience that he is serious about basketball in the more disciplined Georgetown program. If Smith can stay on the floor, control the glass and win the battle against Austin, the Hoyas should not have much of a problem coming out on top.

John Thompson III And The Hoyas Will Try To Slow The Game Down And Dominate The Halfcourt

Oregon will win if… Their guards, primarly Dotson, Joseph Young and Jason Calliste can score regularly and efficiently against a stingy Georgetown defense highlighted by a trio of defensively rock solid guards in Starks, Jabril Trawick and D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera. With Artis out due to suspension, it will fall to Jonathan Loyd, the senior point and last year’s Pac-12 Tournament MVP, to get some penetration in the halfcourt against the stingy Hoya defense and find open shots for the Ducks’ scorers. Young, in particular, is a highly efficient shooter, a guy who will keep defenses honest by dead-eying from deep, while Dotson is best using his chiseled body in the mid-range game, an area that may be tough to exploit here. But the Ducks will be at their best if they can force turnovers and get out in transition to take advantage of their athletic advantage in the open court. While a relatively thin (not another Josh Smith joke, I promise) Duck frontcourt could get pounded by the physical Georgetown group if this grinds into a halfcourt game, Moser and those talented guards could break this game open if they can get easy hoop in transition. One strike against this line of thinking: The suspended Artis is the Ducks’ best guard at creating defensive havoc in the open court.

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1. Good morning and welcome to Pac-12 Media Day. A coach and a player from each of the 12 schools will all be assembled at the Pac-12 Studios in San Francisco today to be grilled by Pac-12 writers from up and down the west coast, including our own representative in Adam Butler. We’ll have plenty of interesting stuff coming your way from this event, but if you’d like to follow along, the conference has set up a live stream for you to watch as each team gets their time on the podium.
2. One thing you can be sure new USC head coach Andy Enfield will be questioned about today is the line that he used to get his players running in practice, as reported by Jeff Faraudo of the San Jose Mercury News: “We play uptempo basketball here. If you want to play slow, go to UCLA.” It’s a great line to be sure, one that the national media picked up on immediately and, aside from the immediate fact that it probably reinforced his overall objective to his team, it also serves as further notice to future recruits, the national basketball populace and certainly to that team in the nicer neighborhood uptown, that the Trojans and their brash new coach aim to be the basketball team in Los Angeles. We’ll have more on this later today.
3. Yesterday we pointed you to some fine position-by-position breakdowns of the Washington roster. Today, we send you to the start of a similar rundown of the California squad by Scott Chong at California Golden Blogs. Last week he kicked off the series with a look at the wings on that squad, a group highlighted by highly-anticipated freshman Jabari Bird. Despite the fact that the Bears are tasked with replacing Pac-12 Player of the Year Allen Crabbe, Cal fans have reason to be confident that Bird and company can keep things going strong in Berkeley. Check back with them regularly to see the rest of the series.
4. It’s no secret that one of the big storylines for Oregon and head coach Dana Altman is the success they are having with transfers, having ridden players like Tony Woods, Arsalan Kazemi, Devoe Joseph and Olu Ashaolu to year-by-year improvement in Eugene. But there’s another aspect to that storyline and a tie between those last two players we mentioned and another pair of senior transfers – Jason Calliste and Richard Amardi – who hope to make their marks in their lone seasons with the Ducks. You see, all four of those guys – Joseph, Ashaolu, Calliste and Amardi – are natives of Toronto who spent time in the Grassroots Elite AAU program. Aside from becoming a home for transfers, Altman has also turned his program into a welcome landing spot for Torontonians.
5. Lastly, a quick check in on some recruiting news, as Michael Humphrey, a raw top-100 2014 power forward has made visits to three Pac-12 campuses to date. But now, according to Bruce Pascoe of the Arizona Daily Star, Humphrey has narrowed his list down to just two schools – Arizona and Stanford. Humphrey told Pascoe that he is “in love” with both schools, but expects to come up with a decision sometime soon after he spends his official visit in Tucson this weekend.

After a long offseason away from college basketball, we’re back. With practice underway across the country, with “Midnight Madness” events looming and with the start of the season on the not-too-distant horizon, it is time to end our hiatus and dig back into hoops. In a year where the Pac-12 seems to sport one legitimate national title contender and a healthy pack of NCAA Tournament contenders, we can finally say that the conference is back from the recent depths and ready to be a consistent contender on the national stage again. But, in taking an offseason sabbatical, we’ve missed some key storylines. So, in order to get you back in the swing of things, we’ll go team-by-team around the conference and quickly catch you up on some key offseason happenings. Later in the week we’ll break down some of these stories in a little more detail. Next week we’ll be back with our daily Morning Fives, and over the course of the next month, we’ll catch you up on everything you need to know going into the 2013-14 Pac-12 season. Without further ado, here’s what you need to know if you’ve been away from the conference for a few months.

Why Is This Man Smiling? Maybe Because He Has the Best Team in the League.

Arizona – The conference’s clear preseason favorite got some good news over the offseason when 6’10″ sophomore forward Zach Peters was granted his waiver request by the NCAA for immediate eligibility after transferring from Kansas. A quality recruit in the 2012 class, Peters career never got off the ground in Lawrence largely due to injuries, including multiple concussions. If he can stay healthy, he’s a stretch-four who can provide another offensive threat for the Wildcats. Elsewhere, Sean Miller continued his hot streak on the recruiting trail, landing 2014 four-star power forward Craig Victor, while continuing his pursuit of additional heavy hitters in next year’s class.

Arizona State – It was an offseason roller coaster for the Sun Devils, with Evan Gordon opting to spend his senior season closer to home at Indiana, only to have Penn State transfer Jermaine Marshall decide that he’d spend his final season of eligibility in Tempe. Marshall, who averaged 15.3 points per game for a depleted Penn State squad last season, will likely slide right into the spot vacated by Gordon’s departure. It’s not all sunshine and roses for Herb Sendek’s team, however, as Jahii Carson is dealing with a stress reaction in his right leg that will limit him in practice during the early going.

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