The middle of January is too soon to name the conference freshman of the year, but barring injury, I think the frosting on the cake reads ‘Oregon St.’s Raegan Beers’.
Beers recorded her 10th double (20 pt, 12 rb, two blocked shots of remarkable prescience) in the Beavers’ 79-69 win at Tempe Sunday. She won her third straight Pac-12 freshman of the week award.
Jelena Mitrovic is 6-9, which presents a matchup problem. Beers is 6-5 and built like a truck — when she’s on the floor with Mitrovic, the theory is that the opposing four has to guard Beers, which isn’t possible. Sending an additional defender to help when they’re both listed at 6-0 isn’t much better — Beers can shoot over two as well as one.
I look forward to seeing how other teams prepare for Oregon St.
I talked about roster depth yesterday as a sort of dumb topic for breathless broadcasters to talk about, because the idea has no meaning in the coachspeak lexicon. Every coach says the team has nine or 10 players worthy of minutes, but they play seven.
Oregon St. is built more shallowly than that: Forwards Mitrovic, Beers, plus a guard rotation Talia Von Oelhoffen, Noelle Mannen, Bendu Yeaney, AJ Marotte. Count that as 180 minutes; then they need 20 minutes from Shalexxus Aaron and Martha Pietsch, and as the boxscore were designed to support my theory, those two played 21 minutes Sunday.
The Oregon St. forwards might bring to mind the original ‘twin towers’ in Houston: The very tall and skinny Ralph Sampson, and the merely tall and powerful Hakeem Olajuwon. The experiment wasn’t a great success because Sampson, who was 7-4 or 7-5, was a 6-3 guard at heart.
| Oregon St. jersey no. | Player | Hollinger ‘gamescore’ |
| 22 | von Oelhoffen,Talia | 5.1 |
| 04 | Mannen,Noelle | 2.1 |
| 01 | Yeaney,Bendu | 2.3 |
| 00 | Aaron,Shalexxus | 1 |
| 12 | Mitrovic,Jelena | 3.9 |
| 15 | Beers,Raegan | 21.6 |
| 11 | Marotte,AJ | 6.2 |
| 31 | Pietsch,Martha | 3.7 |
| 02 | Hansford,Lily | 1.7 |
| 24 | Blacklock,Adlee | -0.8 |
| Arizona St. jersey no. | Player | Hollinger ‘gamescore’ |
| 03 | Skinner,Tyi | 4.9 |
| 02 | Simmons,Jaddan | 9.4 |
| 12 | Hunt,Treasure | 1.2 |
| 22 | Thompson,Journey | 6.7 |
| 42 | Newman,Meg | 0.9 |
| 04 | Crisp,Trayanna | 3.7 |
| 24 | Mokwuah,Kayla | 1.5 |
| 11 | Erikstrup,Sydney | 0 |