With Daylight Savings ending late Saturday night, the Mainland clocks got moved up by an hour. But for the University of Hawai’i men’s basketball team, the season already got moved up by a lot more than that.
In what is the Warriors’ earliest opener in school history, UH will officially begin its 2025-26 campaign with a challenging visit to Oregon on Tuesday. Tipoff is set for 5:30 p.m. Hawai’i time, and the game will be televised by Big Ten Network and broadcast live via radio on ESPN Honolulu 1420 AM.
This will also mark the first time the Warriors will begin their season on the road since 2006, when they lost at UNLV, 73-59.
This opener may be an even tougher challenge, given the Ducks are coming off a 25-10 season and is picked to finish fifth in the Big Ten. Oregon is just two spots outside of the AP Top 25 poll.
“We’re throwing (our players) right into the fire with a great road trip and a great Oregon team,” UH coach Eran Ganot said. “They’re well-coached, well-balanced, they have great size … and (it’s) a tough place to play, which is we want. What a great venue, great history, great tradition.”
Not many are alive today to personally recall, but the Ducks won the very first NCAA Tournament in 1939. That team was referred to as the “Tall Firs,” and the distinct court at Matthew Knight Arena pays tribute to that with pine trees painted on the hardwood.
One Warriors player who is very familiar with Oregon and that court is grad transfer Isaac Johnson, who played his freshman season with the Ducks.
“It’ll be cool to be back,” Johnson said. “But it’s just basketball, at the end of the day. The hoop is 10 feet, a gym is a gym. So we’ll go into it with what we need to take care of, and let the results speak for themselves.”