Stanford’s Second Pac-12 Win in the Desert

The Stanford Women’s Basketball team got another Pac-12 win over Arizona Saturday, in a game not televised in California. The final score was 91 to 51, Stanford, and the only suspense was whether Stanford could make it to 100. Considering they had 51 points at the half, it was totally doable!
Kudos to KSZU for broadcasting the game on live radio over the Internet, so C and R could follow, for the first half anyway. We had to turn them off at half time to go coach our little girls team, which is doing well since we got coaching advice from Tara VanDerveer, hee hee, but we digress.

The game opened with Stanford going on a 13-1 tear, after a Taylor Greenfield three-pointer. Arizona finally woke up and cut the lead to 6 at the 15 and a half-minute mark. But then six minutes later, Stanford was up by 23, with the score 34-11. It's hard to know what happened, as C and R are visual people and this was Internet radio, but a 23 point lead means Stanford pretty much had their way. Strangely, it was not an Ogwumike sister leading the way, but Jos Tinkle, who had 10 points in that stretch. Stanford fans (And coaching staff) were pleased to see others contributing points.

When the smoke cleared and the half ended, Stanford was leading 51-31, and the Ogwumikes HAD taken over the last 10 minutes. Half time point leaders were Chiney with 14, Nneka Ogwumike with 12, Tinkle’s 10 and starting guards Amber Orrrrange and Toni Kokenis with 6 each. Stanford was shooting 57% from the floor. The announcer for KSZU said every offensive rebound for Stanford became a basket for Stanford, and you gotta like those percentages.

As we mentioned, we had to leave at the half, but Tinkle didn’t. She would go on to score a career high 22 points and tie her career high for rebounds at 11. Chiney Ogwumike, going for a record 4th Pac-12 player of the week award, got another double-double with18 points and 10 rebounds and that was in just 22 minutes as the youngsters got more playing time. Sister Nneka scored 15 with 6 boards in 23 minutes. Even better, Toni had 11 points and Amber had 10. That’s five, count ‘em five players in double figures. And, all five were starters. There’s hope yet for a balanced scoring attack! Hee hee. Other notables were Taylor Greenfield with six points on 2 three-pointers and Erica Payne (E Payne) also with 6. Not so notable was Bonnie Samuelson going 0-5 from beyond the arc and finished 0-6 for the day. Hope she finds her shooting touch back home.

What did Stanford’s coach think about the balanced scoring? Here’s Hall of Famer Tara VanDerveer in the papers:
"This is great momentum for us," VanDerveer said. "We've got a long way to go, but I'm really excited about getting major contributions from different people. We depend a lot on Nneka and Chiney, and it's great to have Jos play so well. Nneka and Chiney are so unselfish and so excited about other people doing well...I like the fact we were able to get everybody in and everyone contributed."

Stanford comes back for a two game home stand Thursday and Saturday.

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