Tournament seed at stake for Card

Saturday marks Senior Day for the five seniors on Stanford’s basketball roster, but senior standout Landry Fields insists, “I’m just looking at it as another game.”

Fields may be playing it cool, but the weekend match-up with cross-Bay rival—and the Pac-10’s top team—California is more significant than he lets on.

First and foremost, as the final game of conference play for both teams, it will heavily influence the postseason for the whole conference. The Bears (20-9, 12-5 Pac-10) probably need a win to secure the conference title outright (assuming Arizona State can handle UCLA). And Stanford (13-16, 7-10 Pac-10) needs a win to avoid the play-in game for the Pac-10 Tournament.

As a veteran of tournament play and the player averaging the most minutes in the conference (36.10 a game), Fields hopes the already-shallow Cardinal roster can avoid any extra play.

“Given our personnel and the minutes guys are giving, it would be beneficial for us to play [fewer] games,” Fields said. “It would be big for us to have to win three games to win it all instead of four.”

But to win <I>any<P> games in the conference tourney in L.A., the team, which has often struggled on the road, needs all the momentum it can muster coming out of Saturday.

Senior guard Drew Shiller knows it.

“We know that going into the Pac-10 Tournament, any team could get hot,” Shiller said, “and that team could be us. But, building that momentum definitely starts Saturday.”

Head coach Johnny Dawkins, though, notes that regardless of the postseason implications, the game holds other significance.

“We absolutely realize the importance of this game,” Dawkins said. “One, we’re playing rivals, so it’s always an important game, and the guys are going to compete at a high level. Two, we still want to get as many wins as possible. So, I think it takes on a huge meaning for us, and it has a huge meaning for them.”

On a more personal level, there are a few individuals for whom the game could also have huge meaning. The first is Fields. He ranks in the conference’s top 10 in seven statistical categories, including scoring (first with 22.1 points per game), rebounding (second with 8.6 per game), steals (fourth with 1.66 per game) and blocked shots (10th with .79 per game). If he sounds like a conference Player of the Year candidate, you’re right—with the one blemish on his resume being the team’s overall standings.

A win on Saturday still makes him an iffy candidate; a loss makes him a no-go.

“I think you can make an argument for Landry [as Player of the Year] because there’s so much parity in our conference,” Dawkins said. “Typically, I’m an advocate of ‘to the victor go the spoils.’ Teams that do the best, their players should be honored…but whenever [there is] this much parity, where no one’s really run away with the conference championship, then you have to really look at players from every team and make a determination of who’s the best player. For us, he’s been a do-everything guy…he’s carried a heavy load.”

Contrastingly, for anyone who wants to honor a player from strictly the conference’s best team, Cal’s senior guard Jerome Randle (18.9 ppg, 4.52 assists per game) might be your guy if the Bears stomp on Stanford, like they did back in January.

Randle went 8-11 to notch 24 of the painful points that led to Stanford’s crushing 92-66 defeat.

But there were four Bears in double digits that day—Randle and forwards Theo Robertson, Max Zhang and Omondi Amoke—compared to two Cardinal players in Fields and sophomore Jeremy Green, who combined for 43 points.

Given that two months and the entirety of Pac-10 play have since passed, Dawkins is optimistic that history won’t repeat itself.

“We played them the very first game of the Pac-10 season,” Dawkins said. “Since then, they’ve evolved, and we have too, so I don’t think we can do the same things we did in that game. And I don’t think they will either.”

What the Cardinal can expect, though, is the same breadth of scoring and a daunting challenge on both ends of the floor.

“They’re very efficient offensively,” Dawkins noted. “You’re digging a hole if you’re not keeping pace through the looks that you’re getting. They have four guys all capable of scoring in the 20s…They’re capable, and they’re so explosive offensively, it just takes a run or two for them, and they could knock you out.”

But, Shiller says Stanford is “much more confident” than it was during its first Cal encounter, and thinks a victory is within reach.

“I think we’re a more together team,” Shiller said. “We’ve kind of figured out our identity and what we need to do to win, so hopefully, we can execute that on Saturday.”

Fields agrees, noting that much of Saturday’s result will depend on the parts of the game that Stanford can control.

“They’re a strong group, and it’s going to be hard,” Fields said. “We need to minimize our mistakes, because playing a team like Cal, they’ll capitalize on them.”

Fields and Shiller will take to the floor at Maples for the last time to prove just how much they’ve learned on the Farm. Tip-off is at 3 p.m.