Stanford: UCLA bounces Cardinal from Pac-12 tourney.
LAS VEGAS — Stanford doesn’t know if it did enough in the final two-thirds of the season to earn a berth in the NIT or one of the other lesser postseason tournaments, but the Cardinal apparently have UCLA’s vote.
After the Bruins defeated Stanford 88-77 in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 tournament Thursday afternoon, the UCLA postgame celebration could be heard throughout the bowels of T-Mobile Arena.
“I think UCLA was really, really excited in their locker room afterward, because it meant something to beat us, and I think we’ve done a nice job as a program getting to the point right where it means something to beat Stanford,” head coach Jerod Haase said. “… I will say I’m confident in the team that we have right now, and that we can compete with some of the best teams in college basketball.”
Stanford (18-15) did just that Thursday, making a game of it against fourth-seeded UCLA (21-10) despite foul trouble and the Bruins’ superior depth.
And, Stanford has been doing that since it plugged Dorian Pickens (injury) and KZ Okpala (academics) into the lineup a third of the way into the season.
After a two-game buffer working the wings into the rotation against Kansas and Cal in December, the Cardinal won five straight games to spark a 12-7 close to the season. They won five of their final seven games, and generally showed well, even in losses.
Stanford played right with offensive juggernaut UCLA until the final minutes Thursday, despite Daejon Davis (13 points) playing only 22 minutes because of foul trouble and Okpala (23 points, seven rebounds, five assists, three steals) and Oscar Da Silva joining the freshman point guard on the bench with four fouls for a portion of the second half.
“I sincerely thought that we fought extremely hard,” Haase said. “That’s why the only comment I had at the beginning is how proud I am of the guys. This entire year, it’s been full of adversity. In this game, it was the same thing . ...
“It wasn’t easy, but every time we got down, we kept fighting and competing. … That’s hopefully going to be a staple of this team, but it will be a staple of the program moving forward, as well.”
Stanford survived an early onslaught, trailing 17-8 after 5½ minutes and trailing 30-17 at the 7:54 mark as it tried to catch up to the speed of UCLA a day after playing Cal and the conference’s worst offense. The Cardinal responded with a 15-3 run, including three threepointers during a 76-second stretch, to make it 33-32.
Davis went to the bench with his third personal foul with just more than five minutes remaining in the first half, and UCLA quickly turned a one-point game into a 42-34 lead. Stanford went back to the three-point arc, getting threes from Michael Humphrey and Pickens to trim its deficit to 42-40 just before the break.
The Cardinal were down 47-43 when Davis picked up his fourth foul 66 seconds into the second half, and they managed to keep the deficit to a single digit until he finally got back onto the floor in hopes of another run with 6:50 remaining. Three minutes later, UCLA point guard Aaron Holiday had a dunk and a three-pointer on back-to-back possessions — the acme of his 34-point, eightassist and seven-rebound day — to put away the game.
“They’re an elite-level shooting team with arguably the best point guard in the country, and he played like that today,” Haase said.
And, there was Stanford, hanging right with them for about 36½ minutes.