Stanford finished up a grueling three-game road trip with a solid win over Cal on Wednesday night.
Led by senior Chasson Randle’s game-high 25 points, the Cardinal shot and defended their way to a 69-59 victory. The win marked Stanford’s second straight at Berkeley’s Haas Pavilion and helped the Cardinal maintain their No. 2 ranking in the Pac-12, improving to 12-4 for the season.
Stanford started slow in the first half, committing an uncharacteristic six turnovers as they scored just 26 points before the break. A late charge led by Randle, seniors Anthony Brown and Stefan Nastic put the Cardinal on top as they simply outlasted the overmatched Bears.
“We knew they were going to come out with fight and they should,” Randle told ESPN. “We had to keep our composure. Our seniors led the way, especially in the second half.”
Cal kept it interesting for most of the game, besting Stanford in most metrics as they attempted to end a three-game skid. Sophomore Jordan Mathews contributed 10 second-half points to a fairly good performance, bringing his team within two with fewer than eight minutes to go. Ultimately, however, the Cardinal defense managed to shut down Cal and prevent quality chances. Leading Cal scorer Tyrone Wallace was held to 6-22 from the floor and the team shot just 35.5 percent as it failed to stop the streaking Cardinal and fell to just 1-4 in conference play in their first season under head coach Cuonzo Martin.
Marcus Allen got a surprise start for the Cardinal, the second of his career, as Stanford head coach Johnny Dawkins continues his search for guards to play beside Randle. The sophomore scored just 2 points but recorded a steal and a block in 24 hard-fought minutes on the court.
Depth was an issue for Stanford throughout the night, with Randle, Brown and Nastic accounting for 56 of the team’s 69 points. Two Stanford players (including Randle) were forced to play out much of the second half with four fouls, and the Cardinal bench contributed a season-low 2 points to the effort, due in part to injury-related absences of forwards Reid Travis and Grant Verhoeven. Brown’s 80 percent accuracy from the 3-point line and Randle’s inspired performance were enough to get the job done, however.
Travis’s absence also hurt the Cardinal’s rebounding, as Nastic struggled to pick up the slack left by the team’s former leading rebounder. Brown filled in where he could with an impressive 9 rebounds and Nastic remained tough on the offensive boards as Stanford managed to equal Cal’s second-half rebounding efforts.
These issues will need to be addressed quickly, as Stanford moves into a potentially season-defining three game home stand. The Cardinal face the defending national champion Connecticut Huskies at Maples on Saturday, then move straight into a much-anticipated contest against freshman phenom Stanley Johnson and the No. 10 Arizona Wildcats on January 22 before they finally get a comparative break against Arizona State two days later.
Dawkins will hope that the momentum established by his teams’ victories in six of the last seven games will be enough to help them take at least one victory from this series.
Contact Andrew Mather at amather ‘at’ stanford.edu