Analysis Double-Dip!

For everyone's reading edification, I'll link to the positive, upbeat Cardinal coverage rather than the morose Bears coverage...

Stanford 82, Cal 77

Before I launch into the box score, let's get a couple other things out of the way. First, the game wasn't shown on FSN. Instead, they chose to show... the simultaneous (and intense) Wazoo-ASU game? (Side observation: who would have thought, three years ago, that we'd be saying THAT?) Nope. The Arizona marathon... and a golf recap. OK. Nice work, boys. Instead the game was kicked to obscure Comcast SportsNet, which I don't receive. I ended up watching most of Georgetown-WVA instead.

And second, despite being (by all reasonable measures) more of a Stanford fan, I was kind of rooting for Cal in this one. The Bears have a really, really tough road to hoe at this point. They've only got 4 home games left in the conference to hit the magic number (my personal opinion) of 8 wins. So it's either a. beat Washington State at home, plus Washington and an upset on the road, or b. Spring TWO road upsets from a candidate pool of USC, Arizona, ASU, WSU and Stanford. My BearJection has them at 7-11 and an NIT bid. The good news? I think they'll be a better team next year. Their top incoming recruit is a guard, while their top outgoing player is a center, a position the team has more than locked up for the foreseeable future.

Now, how did the Cardinal win this one? The simple answer is that they did what no one else has managed to do this season: shut down Ryan Anderson. Kind of. He did put up 11 points and 8 rebounds, so it's not like he was exactly invisible out there. But considering his season averages, you've got to consider that a victory.

Second: generate free-throw opportunities. Each team had the same number of field goal attempts and Cal made 4 more of them (admittedly Stanford hit 4 more 3s), but Stanford shot 38 free throws to Cal's 19. Getting into the bonus can be incredibly lucrative in college hoops, and Stanford was (incredibly) into the DOUBLE bonus halfway through the second half. They didn't exactly make the most of the opportunities (24 for 38 from the stripe is less than 60%) but simply having so many more of them made a big difference. Corrolary to this was that they got DeVon Hardin, who otherwise had one of his best games of the season, into foul trouble and eventually out of the game. Hardin, frankly, can take Brook Lopez on the offensive end, and when he was in the game he shot 7 of 9 from the field.

The final key factor I want to touch on is this: Stanford was able to get away with playing a ridiculously "big" lineup in this game because of Cal's shortage of quality guards. By my count, the Cardinal used 5 guards in the game, but played them for only 66 player-minutes. In other words, for at least 14 minutes of the game, the Cardinal had 4 forwards on the floor (most likely Washington, Hill, and the Lopezes). To me, this screams "drive-and-kick!" The problem is, or was, that the only guys who could drive the ball for Cal were the same ones who would receive the kicks-- Patrick Christopher and Jerome Randle. Randle had a good day as a point guard but a dismal day as a shooter, and Christopher couldn't do everything by himself. The two teams seemingly kind of agreed to play the game as a battle in the post by mutual consensus, and Stanford's bigs won the dogfight.

It's unfortunate. Cal played a strong game overall. They had balanced scoring, made their free throws, had a good assist-to-turnover ratio (16 assists-- Stanford typically holds opponents to around 10) and shot well against a national top-10 defense. Cal made 50% of its 2-pointers, which is doing extremely well against Stanford. Had they posted this kind of game against any of the three previous opponents to whom they lost (Oregon and the Arizona schools) they would have won. This is what is known in baseball circles as "underplaying your Pythagorean record," (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll go into this in more detail at the end of the Pac-10 season) and it's enough to cause Ken Pomeroy's ranking system to place them, as of this writing, 311th out of 341 teams in "luck factor."