Oregon Ducks Women’s Basketball Wins Their First B1G Conference Game

Oregon women’s basketball faced the Northwestern Wildcats on Tuesday and picked up their first Big-10 conference win – and one on the road, at that. The Ducks defeated NW in Evanston, IL, 85-65.

As I pointed out in my update of the B1G WWB programs, Northwestern was projected in the preseason to occupy 18th place in the conference. Whether they end up 18th, 16th, 15th, or whatever; that’s just semantics in describing that they are fighting to stay out of the cellar in the conference. The bottom line for Oregon is that if they were to lose this game, you would have to shoot some flares, because that would be an immediate indication of some serious trouble. Again.

Fortunately, that’s not what happened.

The Wildcats started the game with a 5-0 run, but the Ducks caught up and kept pace, primarily from the efforts of Philipina Kyei, who scored six of her 12 points in the first period. Kyei has been recovering from a preseason injury, and even though she had started the previous four games in a row, this was the first game where she looked 100%.

Oregon began to pull away in the second period, and although NW pulled to with one, 29-28, a pair of Duck 7-0 runs followed and Oregon went into the half up nine, 43-34.

The Ducks continued to assert themselves in the second half of the game, and the Wildcats simply did not have the firepower to catch up.

In spite of the final result, I didn’t think that NW played super awful. They were opportunistic at the offensive glass and doubled up the Ducks on 2nd-chance points, 15-8. They were also better at the free throw line. To me, the Wildcats looked better in person than they did off the page.

There were two big problems for NW in this game. First – and they may have just had a bum day – they shot just 1-12 from distance, so they had no perimeter presence. Second, the Ducks just killed them on fast break points, 27-6.

Northwestern’s offense was led by Caileigh Walsh with 15 points, and Kyla Jones with 14 points.

Oregon continued to flex their bench depth, with the bench contributing 46 points. The Ducks shot nearly 56%, and had 25 assists to 11 turnovers.

Oregon was not a very good team today in their production from beyond the arc. This game, they shot 3-12 for 25%. If that continues, it will surely be a problem against better teams going forward. They also really need to shoot better than 62.5% at the line.

Five Ducks finished with double-digit points, led by Peyton Scott with 14. Scott picked up most of her points at the line, shooting 8-9. All three of Oregon’s long ball shots came from Nani Falatea, who shot 3-4 from distance.

After getting the road split to open up conference play, Oregon women’s basketball (10-4, 1-2 Big-10) returns to Eugene where they will host Wisconsin (10-4, 1-2 Big-10). This should be a heck of a game, and tipoff is Saturday, 1/4/25, at 12:30 pm PT.