Weird evening

Last night's Stanford game was not televised. Unfortunately, the Cal game was, for two reasons... one of which I'll get to in a bit. The other?

Well, I have a confession to make. I hate those little scroll bars that they have at the bottom of the screen when my team is playing and not on TV. They freak me out. Every time I'm about to see the score, I get really nervous. Since I don't like this, I have a tendency to try and change the channel. The worst thing of all is when I see the score and I'm not expecting to (especially if my team is losing).

This is pure OCD on my part. I don't think it signifies anything other than that I care too much about sports... and anyone reading this kind of already knows that.

In any event, Stanford managed to pull out a close one over Washington, 82-79.

The game wasn't really as close as it seemed-- Stanford was up five with under 5 seconds to play before Washington hit a meaningless three-- but it certainly wasn't a blowout, either. Jon Brockman had one of those "Hi, I'm a POY candidate even though my team is crap" games that you always fear out of him, and Stanford's defense was uncharacteristically porous. And the rebounding sucked. It's been a while since Stanford has needed to shoot well to win a game, and fortunately the team responded in this one.

Several box-score oddities in this game. First off, Washington had a very strange starting lineup. Apparently Romar was just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck, because two of his bench players individually outscored the combined efforts of every starter other than Brockman. Or maybe he was "sending a message," or something. I don't know. The starter/bench distinction always seemed kind of forced to me anyway, leading to such foolishness as ESPN's Dana O'Neil calling Russell Westbrook a "top bench player" at a time when he was averaging over 30 minutes a game, far more than multiple UCLA starters. As far as I'm concerned, if you're in the top 5 in minutes, you're a starter-- and if your coach inexplicably decides to play the first 3 minutes with his hand behind his back, I really don't care. But no one asked me.

The other really odd thing was this. Stanford shot exactly 50% from the field. OK. Nothing overly odd there. But every single player save two also shot 50% on his shots. Exactly. The only two who didn't were Lawrence Hill, who made 2 of 5, and Landry Fields, who made his only attempt. I'm pretty certain this is up there with "18 out of 20 Oakland A's pitchers have names in the first half of the alphabet" in terms of actual relevance to anything.

Stanford will now face Washington State, and the effort they put forth last night isn't going to cut it against Wazoo. The Cougars played an inspired game against Cal, holding the Bears to the floor and then dispatching them with several well placed whacks with a tire iron last night. Cal's defensive issues showed up again, as the Cougars made 10 of their first 11 shots in the second half (although to be fair, some of them, like Taylor Rochestie's crazy dipsy-doo heave from 12 feet, were just flat-out lucky) and the team was shut out for the final five minutes of the game.

Stanford needs to do several things to win here:

1. Wield Brook Lopez as the primary offensive option. Goods is going to have a tough time shaking the Cougar defenders.
2. Keep Fred Washington on Derrick Low to shut down Wazoo's outside shooting game.
3. Don't let the Cougars generate the free points off of steals that they used to run away with the Cal game.
4. Beat them up on the boards-- it's the only reliable way to generate extra possessions and extra shots against the super-slow-mo offense that WSU runs.

We'll see if the Cardinals can pull this off. WSU is another one of these weird inverse road-home split teams that the Pac-10 is seemingly full of this season. I daresay it's not going to be easy. The game is pretty much a must-win for the Cardinals to have any possible prayer of catching UCLA for the conference title, as I simply don't envision UCLA losing to either Cal or Arizona at this point. Meanwhile, a loss opens up the possibility of WSU (and possibly USC) eking out a tie for second place in the conference-- an eventuality Stanford would really rather avoid if possible.