Pleasant news in the morning
With only eight players and a razor-thin bench, with their top scorer and his 18-point contribution per game out for the season, getting by on nothing but grit and heart, with hopes for a NCAA tournament bid on the line, against a nationally-ranked opponent that had blown Cal out of the water just two days before, after losing embarrassingly to one of the worst teams in the conference and now facing one of the best in the nation, despite all the “experts” picking against them, truly and in every sense of the cliché against all odds:
Stanford 77, No. 10 Washington 67.
Newsfire did a very nice job of aggregating articles on the topic (using a very cool and only semi-documented feature where it searches and aggregates major online news feeds for a given search term, in this case “Stanford basketball”), so:
AP story (via Yahoo! News)
New York Times
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
San Francisco Chronicle
Some backstory I copied and edited after the jump for anyone who cares to catch up on this remarkably gutsy team.
Backstory:
The Stanford men’s basketball team, in the 2003-2004 season, was undefeated for 26 games, until its loss to Washington at the end of the regular season, triggering a downward spiral into a second-round exit from the NCAA tournament and other general bad news (best player, Josh Childress, left early for the NBA; coach Mike Montgomery did the same, crossing the Bay Bridge to coach the Warriors).
The team started the 2004-2005 season with a new coach (former Nevada coach and assistant to Montgomery before that, Trent Johnson) and expected to place second-last in the Pac-10 conference. Horrible start to non-conference play: 2-4 in first 6 games, and backup (albeit second backup) point guard Carlton Weatherby out for the season with a foot injury. Worse start to conference: 0-3 for the first time in very long. All seemed lost, but the team miraculously defeated nationally ranked Arizona at home. Record: 7-7.
The blows started hitting hard and fast, though: key reserves Evan Moore and Mark Bradford quit the team to concentrate on football, and wing Tim Morris (7 points per game, sixth on the team) was declared academically ineligible for the quarter. The team still managed a six-game win streak, but after losing at the Arizona schools, lost top scorer Dan Grunfeld (averaging 18 points a game, second in the Pac-10, most improved scoring in the nation) for the season with a foot injury at Cal. Down to eight scholarship players (of which only 2 scored more than 10 points a night consistently), but still beat UCLA and USC convincingly. Record: 15-9.
Next four games became crucial: win 1, dangle on a thread for NCAA eligibility. Win 2, quite safe. Win 3 or all 4, shoo-in for the tournament.
First game: Lost at Oregon State by a point. Second game: Beat Oregon by 2 (at Oregon). Third: Lost to Washington State by 11, at home. Inexplicable, and all seemed lost — next in town was nationally ranked Washington, who’d just beaten Cal by 33 and Pac-10 title contender Arizona.
Fourth: 77-67. Lock for the NCAA tournament, barring any freakish upsets in the Pac-10 tourney. Fingers crossed…