Apr 10th, 2010
The disappointment of the loss to Connecticut in the NCAA championship game is beginning to fade — although it will never disappear — so it is time to find the proper place for the 2009-2010 Cardinal team in Stanford women’s basketball history.
Stanford's 1990 national championship team,which lost just one game
We at JakesTakeOnSports love these kind of historical comparisons because we can never be proven wrong. Of course, we can never prove we’re right either, but there are a lot more people who want to tell us why we are full of baloney than those who acknowledge our genius.
We digress . . .
It goes without saying that this was one of the best Cardinal teams ever, but was it the best? Obviously, it’s a question that cannot be answered definitively, and this season’s Cardinal team was particularly difficult to rate.
We will claim without reservation that this was one of the three best Stanford teams in history, joining the 1990 Cardinal and the 1997 Stanford team. (Tara VanDerveer coached all three teams, so at least there is no debate about the effect of coaching on each team.)
We omitted the Cardinal 1992 national championship team, because, quite simply, it was not as good. As we all know, the best teams do not always win the national championship. The best men’s team did not win it this year.
But again we digress . . .
Deciding whether this season’s team was better than the 1990 and 1997 squads is the hard part, because this season’s Cardinal was really three teams.
First, there was the Cardinal team that started the season, when JJ Hones was playing 30 minutes a game but Jayne Appel was struggling to regain her form after offseason knee surgery. That Cardinal squad blew out Gonzaga (which beat Texas A&M in the postseason), Duke (which finished ranked No. 6) and Tennessee (which ended up No.3), all at home. That Cardinal team had its final game in the Dec. 23 loss to UConn at Hartford, Conn.
The second Cardinal team of 2009-2010 was the January-February squad, when Appel began playing like she had last season, but Hones’ minutes dropped considerably because her knee started giving her major problems. That Stanford team rolled through the Pac-10 season without a loss.
The third Stanford team of this season was the March-April Cardinal, the one created by the foot and ankle injuries that turned Appel into a shell of herself, while Hones continued to play limited minutes. That Stanford team was lucky to get past Xavier but made it to the NCAA championship game before losing to UConn by six points, the first time during the Huskies’ 78-game winning streak tht the margin was less than 10 points.
The best of this season’s three Cardinal teams was probably the first one, when Nneka Ogwumike burst into the national spotlight, Kayla Pedersen adapted to the small-forward spot, and the Cardinal backcourt had some versatility. Appel was playing well enough to be a factor, and nobody other than UConn could stay on the court with that Stanford team.
So how do we asses this season’s team as a whole? Rank each of this season’s three Cardinal teams, divide by three, take the square root of the rankings of the opponents, multiply by Pi, and add the cosine of the average margin of victory?
Well, no, that is not going to be the plan. We’ll just do it by feel. (Damn the statistics, full speed ahead.)
The 1997 Cardinal, led by Kate Starbird, beat No. 5 Tennessee in Knoxville 82-65, still the Vols’ largest margin of defeat in a home game since 1987. (Tennessee went on to win the national title that season.) Kristin Folkl had yet to join the Cardinal team when it beat the Vols, so Stanford was even better later that season. Stanford’s only two losses were to Old Dominion, the first one coming on the road two days after the Cardinal’s big win over Tennessee, and the other coming in double overtime in the NCAA Tournament semifinals after the Cardinal had a 15-point lead.
The 1990 Cardinal, led by Jennifer Azzi, lost only once while winning the Cardinal’s first national championship, and that one defeat was a three-point road loss against a Washington team that earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Stanford beat Washington by 40 points in their other meeting that season.
However, that Washington team could not be considered one of the best teams in women’s college basketball history, which is the label being put on the only team to beat Stanford this season, UConn. And the ODU team that beat Stanford twice in 1996-97 was not as good as the 2010 UConn squad either. In fact ODU did not even win the 1997 national title, losing to Tennessee in the finals.
Based on the impressive early-season wins and the fact that Stanford lost only to perhaps the best women’s team ever, one could make a pretty good argument that this was Stanford’s best team ever. However, the Huskies were the only national powerhouse the Cardinal had to face in the postseason, because Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Baylor were taken out by other teams. In the postseason, Stanford beat only one team ranked in the top 10 in the final rankings — No. 5 Xavier, which was a No. 3 seed — and the Cardinal was lucky to win that game.
So what can we say? It’s safe to suggest the team Stanford put on the floor in the postseason was not the best Cardinal team ever, but it’s hard to imagine either the 1990 Cardinal or 1997 Cardinal beating the Stanford team of this past November and December. Plus this season’s Stanford team is the only one that was ranked among the top two every week of the season.
Nonetheless, the postseason always carries the most weight, and Stanford was not at its best then.
Our rankings of the alltime best Stanford women’s teams:
1. Stanford 1990
2. Stanford 2010
3. Stanford 1997
And we’re right about this, no matter what you say.
See a more complete listing of the top Stanford teams of alltime here.
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