ROBERTO.NELSON.UCLA.JPG

Oregon State guard Roberto Nelson leads the Pac-12 averaging 21.5 points per game.

(The Associated Press)

EUGENE -- When Oregon basketball seeks answers, it turns to its pick-and-roll.

It’s one of the Ducks’ pet sets, where in a best-case scenario a guard barrels around a screener at the three-point arc like a sprinter running the curve in the 200 meters. With Joseph Young scoreless in the first halves last week at Arizona and Arizona State, the Ducks pick-and-rolled when little else – UO started 1-of-16 from three-point range in Tempe -- worked.

It’s inescapable that success in basketball, like the high pick-and-roll, relies on five players and a corps of reserves. Yet Oregon’s fortunes the rest of this season appear to be tied exclusively to Young’s shooting hand.

“When Joey caught fire,” said senior Mike Moser after Young scored 29 points in the second half against Arizona State, “that was huge.”

In that sense, the Ducks are much the same as Oregon State, their opponent Sunday in the second Civil War.

Young (18.4 points per game) and the Beavers’ Roberto Nelson (21.5 per game) are guards whose statistics rate among the nation’s elite and whose performances, good or bad, will figure heavily in the outcome of the Civil War at Matthew Knight Arena. And for each team, a victory Sunday could either be the necessary kick to jumpstart their flagging postseason hopes or … a much less favorable result.

The Beavers and Ducks still have numerous options to score, of course, best put to use via their signature elements of the Princeton offense and pick-and-roll, respectively, that only work if everyone is in harmony. They’ve helped OSU rank 19th in Division I field-goal percentage and Oregon tie for 10th with 83.3 points per game.

Yet winning Sunday likely boils down to stopping Nelson or Young, whose buckets have become bellwethers.

“That’s why we won the game with the margin we did,” Arizona coach Sean Miller said Sunday of holding Nelson to 10 points, well below his conference-leading average. “... We knew we could crack ‘em.”

Oregon's Joseph Young, center, leads the Ducks in a cheer after defeating BYU in overtime in December.

Oregon State’s statistical reliance on Nelson -- he’s attempted 27 percent of OSU’s shots -- is moreso than the Ducks’ on Young. Nelson is involved in 32.8 percent of his team’s possessions, 14th-most in the country. And when he’s missing, it’s not pretty.

The Beavers’ loss to No. 2 Arizona on Sunday was primarily because when Nelson couldn’t shoot, and center Angus Brandt was sidelined with foul trouble within the game’s first seven minutes, no one else filled the void.

Coach Craig Robinson said he has confidence someone else can.

“There's actually three options,” Robinson said Tuesday. “I feel great about Devon Collier, I feel great bout Angus Brandt, I feel great about Eric Moreland and now with Hallice Cooke, he’s been really efficient and any one of those guys is able to step up if Roberto isn't going.

“If he's the other guy that the other team is trying to keep from scoring we've got three other guys.”

Young, by comparison, accounts for 22.6 percent of UO possessions used and has attempted more than a quarter of the team’s shots. Basketball-reference.com ranks Young’s offensive win shares – the number of wins a player has contributed to his team via his scoring – among the nation’s 15 best.

Whereas Nelson's shooting percentage is about even between victories and losses this season, Young is shooting 12 percentage points better when Oregon wins.

“The rim's pretty wide open,” Young said Saturday, which came two days after scoring all his 14 points against Arizona also in the second half. “I just got what I got and I was making them.”

Though Oregon is not as one-dimensional as Oregon State it is a stark difference from the team’s December narrative, when six Ducks averaged in double figures in points during the first eight games. The contributors seemed endless and Oregon’s ceiling seemed to follow.

Fifteen games later, four Ducks still average double figures but in Oregon’s last six games, only Young has scored 10 or more each time. His play has both helped and hurt the Ducks, after his ill-advised three-pointer in the final minute against Arizona on Thursday effectively sealed UO’s empty upset bid.

Two days later another second-half outburst happened, too, with Young going for 29 points. He scored the Ducks’ final 11 points.

“He got it going and everything looked good,” Altman said following the loss to Arizona State. “In 25 years I've seen a lot of things but 29 in a half's pretty good.”

After each of their losses in the desert last week, Robinson and Altman noted that, of course, finishing victories requires all five players. A big game from their star player, though, certainly helps the process.