March Madness: St. Mary’s men, Stanford women set for tournament action.
In the Pac-12 tournament final, the Stanford women trailed Oregon State 22-12 after one quarter. They looked to be in deep trouble against the regular-season champion, which had already beaten them twice. The Cardinal would shoot a miserable 33 percent for the game. They would also win. Defense wins championships. You’ve heard it forever. And in this game it was pivotal. Oregon State is excellent on defense too, but Stanford was just a little bit better. The Beavers scored just seven points in the second quarter.
And seven in the third quarter. And seven in the fourth. Stanford won 48-43.
The Cardinal bring one of the nation’s toughest defenses into the NCAA Tournament Saturday. They play WAC champion New Mexico State at 10:30 a.m. in a first-round game in Manhattan, Kan. In the 1 p.m. game, host Kansas State plays Drake. The winners play Monday at a time to be determined.
Stanford ranks No. 2 in the Pac-12 and 15th in the country in scoring defense, allowing just 55.5 points per game. It ranks first in the conference and sixth in the country in opponents’ field-goal percentage (34.2 percent).
“Once we can function all together, it’s like a machine out there,” forward Kaylee Johnson said.
Stanford doesn’t spend a lot of time working on defense in practice once the season starts. “Offense takes longer — timing, passing,” head coach Tara VanDerveer. “Defense is more effort.”
That helps explain why she never recruits a player mainly because of her defense. “We recruit every one because of their offense,” she said.
She wants to see an offensive skill set, figuring she and her staff can teach good athletes how to play defense. If they don’t buy into playing tough defense, they don’t play.
Besides sheer effort, she said, the key to playing great defense is “learning the scheme. These are smart kids. We can do things that maybe a lot of other teams don’t try to do.”
Why is that? “They concentrate. We’re counting on them to concentrate. We’ll tell them, ‘This is how we’re going to play screens, or doubles.’ They focus in a certain way.”
Guard Briana Roberson said she developed her defensive skills playing one-on-one with her older brother, Kenny. He’s 7 years older, and she said, “I had to figure out a way to lock him up.”
Roberson, who was named to the All-Pac-12 defensive team, took turns with Marta Sniezek guarding the talented Sydney Wiese in the Pac-12 tournament title game.
“She’s a lefty, but she prefers going right,” Roberson said. “She has a nice stepback. We figured that staying on her right hand would disrupt that.” (Wiese had just 13 points on 2-for-9 shooting from beyond the arc.)
Roberson is one reason Stanford seldom plays zone defense. “I like Bri being right on somebody,” VanDerveer said. “She realized that’s her hook, her reason to be on the court. There were games we couldn’t take her out. Her defense has been phenomenal all year.”
This year’s team may not even be one of the best defensive teams she has had at Stanford, she said, but it has relied more on defense than other teams because its offense has been inconsistent.
That reliance puts a premium on the scouting reports that form the backbone of the team’s defensive preparations. Assistant coaches Kate Paye and Tempie Brown divide the upcoming opponents and prepare detailed reports on each player’s offensive tendencies.
There’s a lot more to it than who likes to go right and who likes to go left. “It’s pretty much taking away what every player likes to do,” Johnson said. “We switch a lot, so you could be on all five players. I want to know their favorite moves, where they like to shoot from.”
Against the opposition’s best post player, Cal’s Kristine Anigwe for example, the Cardinal sometimes doubleteamed her as soon as she got the ball. Sometimes the double came when she took her first dribble. Sometimes they fronted her, sometimes not. Anigwe, an All-Pac-12 selection, wasn’t much of a factor in either of Stanford’s backto-back wins over the Bears.
The trick to applying a double-team is to know which player to leave unguarded, VanDerveer said. Washington presented a problem in that regard because it has so many fine shooters. Mainly it has Kelsey Plum, the nation’s top scorer (31.7 points per game) and the highest scoring college player of all time. She dropped 44 points on Stanford — the most against the Cardinal in nearly two decades — but Stanford won 72-68.
“She’s the hardest guard I’ve had to cover,” Roberson said. “She can pull up from anywhere. You can be really disciplined, and she’ll still score.”