Defense wins championships, we’re told. If that were entirely true, we’d be discussing two historic upsets — Butler over Duke and Stanford over Connecticut — instead of searching for reasons for defeat.
Defense is key, but only when it has some help from its offense. Both the Bulldogs and the Cardinal received little of the latter in the second half of their championship games. Both lost in heartbreaking fashion.
While the parallel to the Bulldogs is nice, it’s not our charge. We’ll let the Butler Collegian take that on. Let’s look at the reasons for Stanford’s ultimate demise.
It’s too easy to say that Connecticut, arguably the greatest women’s basketball team of all time, was an unstoppable force. Stanford played with the Huskies for 20 minutes in December and 30 minutes in April, and kept both games close, despite self-inflicted wounds. This is not to say that the two teams should be considered equals; the Huskies were the unanimous pick to win yesterday. The Cardinal does deserve credit for giving Connecticut two of its toughest tests over its lengthy run. But unfortunately, moral victories do not show up in the box score, nor do they garner trophies. That is not to say that Stanford should be lambasted for its performance — ultimately, the season ended as it began, with the Huskies in the top spot and the Cardinal immediately below. But the question is this: the championship game was entirely winnable, so what happened?
Two areas of examination: play over the course of the season and play during the individual contest. First, the road to the Final Four.
If you asked Tara VanDerveer at nearly any point during the year, she would say that there were areas where the Cardinal needed constant improvement. It’s hard to say that the No. 2 team in the country underperformed, but there were problems that persisted: a lack of a consistent outside presence, slow starts to begin games, injuries to Jayne Appel that hampered her productivity and even some trouble finishing near the basket.
Most of these issues were correctable, but Stanford was rarely forced to fix them. There is little, if any, parity in women’s basketball. The Cardinal, an extremely talented, cohesive and well-coached team, didn’t always have to play its best ball in order to win in dominant fashion. The Pac-10 was not strong, and even in an intense out-of-conference schedule, the Cardinal found success despite struggling in some key areas. VanDerveer called the team’s rebounding performance against Duke, for instance, “an absolute ‘F.’”
And so, as Stanford advanced further into the tournament, and the competition was limited to the absolute cream of the crop, the heat exposed year-long weaknesses. The Cardinal shot just 22.2 and 6.7 percent from behind the arc against Xavier and Oklahoma, respectively, for example. Stanford would have been lucky to get to overtime against the Musketeers if Dee Dee Jernigan was able to hit one of her two wide open layup attempts, and the Cardinal would have been in serious trouble against the Sooners if not for Nneka Ogwumike’s all-time excellent performance.
By the time the championship game came around, the problems were there to see. First, the positives: defensively, it was an excellent performance, and frankly, better than the Huskies’. Stanford had trouble finishing good takes; Connecticut had trouble finishing tough takes. Every shot was challenged, particularly in the first half, and it wasn’t until Maya Moore decided that she’d show everyone why she’s the best in the nation that the Huskies were able to do a terrible amount in the paint.
But offensively, it was abysmal, and the reasons were apparent. The common factors were there: close shots were not finished, the midrange game was severely lacking and while Jeanette Pohlen found a semblance of a stroke from behind the arc in the first half, she, like the rest of her Stanford teammates, did not find similar success in the final 20 minutes. Appel tried, heroically, to play through the pain of injuries that have decreased her productivity all year, but ultimately, they took their toll, and one of Stanford’s all-time post players finished her career 0-12 from the field. The Cardinal started slow, but unlike many of its other contests, it did not follow that up with an impressive second half.
Connecticut, meanwhile, was not suffocating. Many of the baskets were there for the taking. But ultimately, the usual issues surfaced which, combined with below-average shooting days from Ogwumike and Kayla Pedersen, who have been a collective rock all season, doomed Stanford.
This is all to say: in a game that was ugly for both teams, the Cardinal had its chances. But when prior problems aren’t remedied, the top team in the land — even on an off day — is going to exploit them.
Wyndam Makowsky is really going out on a limb to say that 26.5 percent shooting doomed Stanford. Learn why not scoring hurts your chances of winning at [email protected].