Preview:
After our highly encouraging outing against team USA, Stanford opens its season against Eastern Washington. Eastern Washington was 13-20 last year and has just three juniors or seniors on their team. They have three returning starters, including a 6'3" post and a pretty decent point guard. Their coach talks a lot about their "depth" especially with their sophomore class. They handily won their exhibition against Northwest University--not to be confused with Northwestern--a small liberal arts college in Seattle.
Overview:
This is a game we were supposed to win, and we did. But unlike a lot of similar games over the last four years, we won it by an enormous margin, and our second team and third team kept extending the margin. I don't remember a game in which our third string actually extended our lead--so this was a show of very great depth. We knew that Belibi was good, but with 15 rebounds she is starting to look like a Kaylee Johnson who can finish at the basket too. The biggest revelation to me was Prechtel, who started, and showed off a back-to-the-basket move to go along with 3/4 three point shooting. So much for the theory that she lacks a back-to-the-basket move. On offense, it seems she lacks nothing. She is going to be a special player.
Performances:
Tara gave no one more than 20 minutes, and all 13 uninjured players played, and 12 scored--all but Lacie. We shot at 57%, and held them to 13%. We out rebounded them 45-20. We had 24 assists to their 6. It was a dominating performance.
No point in laboring too closely over the stats when the opponent was clearly overmatched. But Belibi coasted to a double-double in only 18 minutes of play. Prechtel led scoring with 15 points but also only with 18 minutes. Jump missed her first two trey attempts and then went 4/5 the rest of the way. Her stroke is smooth and very fast--faster than Bonnie or Karlie. Jones had a couple of beautiful assists--she seemed to me to be almost TOO unselfish at time.
Wilson and Brown got lots of time at the point as Williams was kept to just 17 minutes.
Nobody got more than 2 fouls--probably because nobody played for more than a half. Freshmen are so prone to fouls, usually, so it was good to see it is not thus far a problem. That shows some maturity.
At the chalk talk, Lindy confirmed that the four freshmen need to work on their defense--particularly post defense. The Stanford "scouting report" defense requires learning a lot of information and committing it to muscle memory so you can act on it without hesitation. None of the new players have ever been asked to do anything like that before. We can't really judge how they did with this last night because there wasn't really a scouting report--we had no current information on Eastern Washington, even though Eastern Washington has seen our game against USA. So despite our success defensively--it was not a typical defense for us.
While it is harder for fans to observe and certainly less glamorous than offense, given that we will be able to get plenty of offense from many of our players--it is going to be those who are also effective on defense who gets most of the playing time. That makes me this the Lexie will be high on the list.
Fingall looked to me like she still has a ways to go before she is a complete player again. She labored up and down the floor and seemed to have a slight limp at times. Dodson, we were told, has an injury that is healing slowly and it is hard to know when she will be back. This means that Belibi and Prechtel should have lots of playing time for a while, which is exactly what they need.
Conclusion:
What an exciting time to be a Stanford WBB fan. Many more should come out to the games. True, Tuesday night is a lousy time for working families, but attendance was bad--supposedly 2277, but it did not look that large to me. But we are watching the elements of a national championship team developing here. If not this year, soon.
After our highly encouraging outing against team USA, Stanford opens its season against Eastern Washington. Eastern Washington was 13-20 last year and has just three juniors or seniors on their team. They have three returning starters, including a 6'3" post and a pretty decent point guard. Their coach talks a lot about their "depth" especially with their sophomore class. They handily won their exhibition against Northwest University--not to be confused with Northwestern--a small liberal arts college in Seattle.
Overview:
This is a game we were supposed to win, and we did. But unlike a lot of similar games over the last four years, we won it by an enormous margin, and our second team and third team kept extending the margin. I don't remember a game in which our third string actually extended our lead--so this was a show of very great depth. We knew that Belibi was good, but with 15 rebounds she is starting to look like a Kaylee Johnson who can finish at the basket too. The biggest revelation to me was Prechtel, who started, and showed off a back-to-the-basket move to go along with 3/4 three point shooting. So much for the theory that she lacks a back-to-the-basket move. On offense, it seems she lacks nothing. She is going to be a special player.
Performances:
Tara gave no one more than 20 minutes, and all 13 uninjured players played, and 12 scored--all but Lacie. We shot at 57%, and held them to 13%. We out rebounded them 45-20. We had 24 assists to their 6. It was a dominating performance.
No point in laboring too closely over the stats when the opponent was clearly overmatched. But Belibi coasted to a double-double in only 18 minutes of play. Prechtel led scoring with 15 points but also only with 18 minutes. Jump missed her first two trey attempts and then went 4/5 the rest of the way. Her stroke is smooth and very fast--faster than Bonnie or Karlie. Jones had a couple of beautiful assists--she seemed to me to be almost TOO unselfish at time.
Wilson and Brown got lots of time at the point as Williams was kept to just 17 minutes.
Nobody got more than 2 fouls--probably because nobody played for more than a half. Freshmen are so prone to fouls, usually, so it was good to see it is not thus far a problem. That shows some maturity.
At the chalk talk, Lindy confirmed that the four freshmen need to work on their defense--particularly post defense. The Stanford "scouting report" defense requires learning a lot of information and committing it to muscle memory so you can act on it without hesitation. None of the new players have ever been asked to do anything like that before. We can't really judge how they did with this last night because there wasn't really a scouting report--we had no current information on Eastern Washington, even though Eastern Washington has seen our game against USA. So despite our success defensively--it was not a typical defense for us.
While it is harder for fans to observe and certainly less glamorous than offense, given that we will be able to get plenty of offense from many of our players--it is going to be those who are also effective on defense who gets most of the playing time. That makes me this the Lexie will be high on the list.
Fingall looked to me like she still has a ways to go before she is a complete player again. She labored up and down the floor and seemed to have a slight limp at times. Dodson, we were told, has an injury that is healing slowly and it is hard to know when she will be back. This means that Belibi and Prechtel should have lots of playing time for a while, which is exactly what they need.
Conclusion:
What an exciting time to be a Stanford WBB fan. Many more should come out to the games. True, Tuesday night is a lousy time for working families, but attendance was bad--supposedly 2277, but it did not look that large to me. But we are watching the elements of a national championship team developing here. If not this year, soon.