Stanford will look to avenge one of its biggest and most painful losses last season when it hosts rival Cal in a Pacific-12 Conference game Tuesday night.
The game will pair a Stanford team that’s found a way to win numerous close games this season against a Cal squad that hasn’t.
Stanford is 12-7, 5-4; Cal is 9-12, 2-8.
Last season’s 76-58 Cal triumph over Stanford in the Pac-12 Tournament wasn’t one of those close games. The Golden Bears, seeking to avoid a 20th loss they would get the next day, ended the Cardinal’s season last March in the first round.
Stanford has rebounded to put itself on the periphery of NCAA Tournament discussion with a pair of narrow wins over nationally ranked Southern Cal this season.
The second of the two wins, 64-61 on Thursday in Los Angeles thanks to a key Harrison Ingram basket with 34 seconds remaining, came two days before the Cardinal got smacked 66-43 by host UCLA.
Stanford, which also has three-point home wins over Oregon and Arizona State this season, will seek to improve to 9-1 on campus. The lone loss came Jan 20, 85-57 to national power Arizona.
Cal’s visit will tip off a four-game homestand for Stanford, which includes a rematch with UCLA on Feb. 8.
“We have eight games in 17 days,” Stanford coach Jerod Haase noted after the UCLA game. “We don’t have a lot of time to wallow in self-pity or celebrate. We have to learn from film. There’s not going to be a lot of practice time.”
The Golden Bears weren’t as fortunate as Stanford in their concurrent trips south, although Cal coach Mark Fox did note improvement from Thursday’s 81-57 loss at UCLA to Saturday’s tightly contested 79-72 defeat at USC.
“We did a lot of good things,” Fox said of a game in which the Golden Bears shot 50 percent from the field, hit half their 16 3-point attempts, and tied the Trojans 28-28 in rebounds. “But we just didn’t close it, and again we just got murdered at the free-throw line, and that’s the difference in the game.”
Cal was outscored 21-8 at the line, going 8-for-11 compared with USC’s 21-for-28.
Jordan Shepherd was the Golden Bears’ leading scorer on the trip at an average of 10.5 points per game.
–Field Level Media
