Before the sentence can even be finished, Stanford senior guard Matt Lottich interjects and says it cannot be done.
No team has gone undefeated since the Pacific-10 expanded from the Pac-8 after the 1977-78 season, and he isn’t expecting his second-ranked Cardinal to do it this season.
“It’s the competition,” said Lottich, the New Trier graduate who is Stanford’s leading scorer at 14 points a game. “There are so many capable players in this league. For instance, [USC’s] Desmon Farmer goes off for 40 [against Arizona]. Every team has a guy capable of doing that.”
Of course, no one anticipated Stanford (15-0, 6-0 Pac-10) would be in the position. Not with Josh Childress missing the first six weeks with a foot injury or with games against then-top-ranked Kansas, Gonzaga and at Arizona already played.
But here it is late January, and the Cardinal, which beat UCLA on Thursday and hosts Southern California on Saturday, remains perfect.
Furthermore, with Childress healthy and coming off the bench, Rob Little and Justin Davis controlling the inside game and Lottich and Chris Hernandez making Stanford deadly from the outside, the Cardinal’s only weakness might be complacency.
“They’ve got great balance, and it is a testimony to their team that there is no one guy that you say going into the game, stop this guy and you stop them,” California coach Ben Braun said. “They’re a really balanced team, and they’ve got a lot of intangibles that help them–free-throw shooting down the stretch, outside shooting if you zone them. If you key on their shooters, they’ve got guys who can score on the blocks.”
Braun knows firsthand. His Golden Bears were held to 17 first-half points in a 68-61 loss to Stanford last weekend.
“They’re deceptively quick,” Braun said. “They do score in transition. A lot of people might think they don’t. I think that’s really where they hurt us. They hurt us in transition more than anywhere else.”
That balance manifests itself in many ways, but mostly with the inside-outside approach to offense.
Stanford leads the conference in scoring margin at plus-15.3 points per game but doesn’t have a scorer in the league’s top 10. In the victory over Cal, Lottich led the team with only eight shots, and he paces five players averaging double digits in scoring.
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“I think it makes us harder to guard in terms of the feeling of taking one guy out and that being the end of Stanford,” coach Mike Montgomery said. “We can score inside, we can score outside. We’ve got some slashers. We’ve got some depth and so forth, but the reality is we’re winning with defense and rebounding.”
Stanford leads the conference in field-goal-percentage defense of 39.3 percent and rebound margin of plus-9.4 per game.
“They’re a hard-nosed team,” UCLA point guard Cedric Bozeman said. “They’re relentless. There’s not soft guys on their team. They’re a very tough team.”