Daniel Uthman

USA TODAY Sports

EUGENE, Ore. — There are many constants in Dana Altman’s basketball coaching tenure at Oregon.

The Ducks have won at least 21 games every season and are on pace to top that in 2015-16.

Oregon has made the postseason in each of his five seasons, with its current three-year run of NCAA tournament bids the longest in school history. With a lead in the Pac-12 standings and a top-10 RPI, expect the Ducks to extend that streak.

And the Ducks have done this with drastically different personnel, with an average of eight players coming and going from every season’s roster, not including incoming freshmen.

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How does this happen? When Altman and his staff recruit, they don’t look at strengthening a particular position on the roster, they look at maximizing the possibilities for the roster. This approach has multiple benefits: It feeds the style of play Oregon wants to employ, it mitigates holes that roster turnover creates and it doesn’t dwell on the measurables that often feed recruiting ratings, giving the Ducks a broader and deeper pool of players to evaluate and pursue.

“Coach always says he recruits you for your versatility, that you can do a lot more things than the average player can do,” said sophomore Dillon Brooks. “You don't just have one skill set, you have three, four skill sets that you can play any way.

“That's why he recruited me, especially because he saw me as a smart player who can play a lot of positions. He's just a mad man with his utensils. He's just doing what he wants out there and putting anyone in any place and expecting you to play your heart out.”

Brooks is one of six players on Oregon’s 13-man roster who stand 6-feet-6 or taller, and his physical gifts allow his coaches to put him anywhere from shooting guard to center. Depending on substitution patterns and despite ranging in height from 6-4 to 6-10, freshman Tyler Dorsey and seniors Elgin Cook, Dwayne Benjamin and Chris Boucher also shift between on-court roles.

They are among the five Oregon players who have led the team in scoring this season, and four of them have had games of 20 points or more. Brooks says that fact makes the Ducks a difficult teams to scout, and it’s showing as they have won seven of their past nine games and moved into the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll at No. 24 this week.

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“Guys that do one thing or are locked into one position, it limits you as a coach on how you're going to play, and versatility is a value that we look for,” Altman said. “Figuring out ways to play and getting guys who can play that way is kind of important for us.”

When opponents go with big lineups, Oregon (16-4) pushes the tempo, because even its tallest players such as the 6-10 Boucher have shown they can run the floor. When teams go small, players such as Brooks and Cook can thrive in the paint because they’ve spent so much time rotating through the post role.

“It's positionless,” said Brooks, who has emerged as a leading candidate for Pac-12 Player of the Year. “And that's how you can get the most minutes: You can play the 3, you can play the 2, you can play the 5, you know all the spots, so when coach trusts you, he can keep you in the game for longer.”

Though Altman has pieced together successful rosters with this strategy, it's helped out in a particularly important way in terms of roster attrition. In recent years, the question for Oregon hasn't been how long it can keep players in games but how long it can keep them in the program.

Whether because of fit, talent or even scandal, since the 2009-10 season, 21 players with eligibility remaining have left the team and 26 non-freshman players have entered it, usually as Division I or junior college transfers. Players and peers revere Altman for his ability to come up with winning approaches with at-times ephemeral rosters.

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And they are becoming less ephemeral. This season Oregon added the fewest number of non-freshmen to its roster since 2012-13, and it retained its core freshmen from 2014-15: Brooks, point guard Casey Benson and forwards Jordan Bell and Roman Sorkin. Overall, current Oregon players accounted for 58% of the team's minutes played last season, which is slightly better than the Division I average, according to statistician Ken Pomeroy.

Oregon also plans to appeal the NCAA for a sixth year of eligibility for Villanova graduate transfer Dylan Ennis, who missed all but two games this season with a broken foot. And it is getting paperwork together to file an eligibility appeal on behalf of Boucher, a junior college transfer from Montreal who leads the Pac-12 in blocked shots and has quickly endeared himself to his teammates and coaches.

“When you have those guys who have started three or four years, that's when you really can put a special year together,” Altman said. "We'd sure like to have them stay around. But we want them to do what's best for them. That's the bottom line of any program, but it is sure nice to have them.”

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