On Friday Oregon basketball received a late addition for the 2018-19 season in 6-foot-4 guard Ehab Amin. Amin will have one year of eligibility to play for the Ducks after spending the first three years of his college career at Texas A&M Corpus Christi.

Amin provides a veteran perimeter ball handler, and another competent scorer (he averaged 16.9 points per game during his last season with the Islanders in 2016-17), but offense is not his calling card.

Blessed with excellent quickness and defensive timing, he recorded 101 steals back in 2016-17, good for 3.3 per contest and the second most in the nation that season. That's a boatload of pilfers. For context, last season Troy Brown led the way with 55 steals, and did so in four more games than Amin, and the program's single-season record of 89 by Malcolm Armstead in 2010-11 came when the team played 38 games — Amin played just 31.

The moment he steps on campus, he'll become the team's top perimeter defender, and the most decorated pilferer since Armstead played nearly a decade ago.

Not a shabby addition in late June, huh?

Combine the perimeter defensive skills of a guy like Amin, a player the program has rarely had, with the impassable length of big men Bol Bol, Kenny Wooten, Francis Okoro and Miles Norris, and scoring on the Ducks won't be easy. Simply put, the defensive roster the Ducks trot out there has the potential to be better than anything seen since Dana Altman has been at Oregon.

The best defensive group to date was the 2016-17 crew which reached the Final Four. That group ranked second nationally in blocked shots (6.4 per game), and 22nd nationally in both field goal percentage defense (40.3 percent) and three-point percentage defense (31.3 percent).

But, they didn't have a steal guy like Amin. The team ranked just 148th in steals per game (6.5) and 167th in turnovers forced per game (13.2).

Is it too much to ask this year's bigs to match or surpass the numbers put up by the two best rim protectors in program history in Jordan Bell and Chris Boucher? Maybe. But, it's also not that farfetched either.

Remember, Wooten was a candidate for Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year after blocking 92 shots last season. That number is right on par with the 94 that Bell swatted as a frosh, and not far from Boucher's record-setting first season offering of 110 in 2015-16.

Bol will be the wildcard. While it could be hyperbolic to say Oregon hasn't had a defensive pest like Amin before, it's simply reality that the Ducks have never had a player with Bol's physical intangibles. He's 7-foot-2 with a reported 7-foot-8 wingspan. Both those numbers would put him in the top five percentile of the NBA right now.

What Oregon gets defensively out of Bol could be the difference in a deep run in March and a second consecutive disappointing season. It will certainly also decide if this is the best defensive unit either. If he's ready to become the NCAA's premier rim protector, their might not be a less enviable defensive draw than the Ducks in the country next season.

Finally, the length this team possesses on the perimeter is better than 2016-17 team. While Dylan Ennis, Dillon Brooks and Casey Benson were strong on-ball and team defender, they don't share the same length of this year's batch of VJ Bailey, Abu Kigab and Louis King.

The pieces are now in place for the Ducks to be not just a great defensive team, but also the best the program has seen since Altman took over nearly a decade ago.