What a difference a year makes.
Last year: a 26-game winning streak, a No. 1 ranking, two game-winning buzzer beaters and lottery pick Josh Childress, ’04. This year: a new coach, a rocky start to the season and a roster depleted by resignations/ineligibility/injury/you name it.
Nevertheless, the men’s basketball team nabbed its 11th consecutive NCAA berth—and an eight seed, to boot. Although they lost in the first round to Mississippi State, 93-70, head coach Trent Johnson and his players were holding their heads high.
“I will remember this year as the year when our team had to dig down the deepest to elevate our game,” says redshirt junior guard Chris Hernandez. “I will always be proud of how we looked past the adversity and negativity.”
Due to the Maples Pavilion renovation, the Cardinal began the season with seven straight road games—its longest away stretch since 1934-35. It hit a three-game losing streak in late November, but two of those losses were to eventual Final Four teams Louisville and Michigan State.
Stanford also went through a rough patch at the outset of Pac-10 play, dropping its first three games. Sophomores Mark Bradford and Evan Moore left the team to focus on football, and redshirt freshman Tim Morris was declared academically ineligible.
Then, the turning point: a January 8 upset of Arizona, 87-76, which fueled a six-game winning streak. But during the February 12 home victory over Cal, the Cardinal’s leading scorer, junior guard Dan Grunfeld, suffered a season-ending injury to his anterior cruciate ligament. The remaining healthy players—all nine of them—stepped up.
Sophomore guard Fred Washington took Grunfeld’s place in the starting lineup against USC on February 17 and racked up 22 points. Three days later against UCLA, Hernandez poured in a career-high 37 points, the highest total posted by a Stanford player since Casey Jacobsen, ’03, dropped 41 on Oregon during the 2001-02 season. Junior forward Matt Haryasz averaged more than 16 points and 10 rebounds over the final 15 games.
The Cardinal finished the Pac-10 season in third place, with an 11-7 record. In the first round of the conference tournament March 10, senior center Rob Little scored the final basket to secure the win over Washington State, 60-58. The next day, the Washington Huskies exacted revenge for their loss to Stanford earlier in the week, winning 66-63.
Stanford bids farewell to Little, who ranks fifth on the school’s career games list, and versatile senior swingman Nick Robinson, whose 107 career steals place him 10th all-time. The 2005-06 squad should feature Hernandez and a healthy Grunfeld, both of whom were named to the All-Pac-10 team. “We have a lot of players returning and have a good crop of freshmen coming in,” Hernandez says. “Next year looks very promising.”
