2011 USC Trojans Basketball: USC @ Stanford

In the downmarket section of the Pac-10 Conference, where everyone has been removed from NCAA Tournament at-large consideration for quite some time, there’s only one reason left to hope that something big can happen in the winter of 2011. For the USC basketball team, perhaps a glimmer of hope still exists as February winds down.

The Southern California Trojans defeated the Stanford Cardinal in Pac-10 competition from Maples Pavilion in Stanford, California, on Saturday evening. The win moved the Trojans to 7-7 in conference play. Stanford fell to 6-9 in head coach Johnny Dawkins’s third season at the helm on The Farm.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how the next three weeks unfold. Pac-10 watchers will recall that in 2009, USC – ticketed for the NIT unless it could win the Pac-10 Tournament and steal the automatic bid from the league – did exactly that. Then-coach Tim Floyd piloted the Men of Troy to wins over California, UCLA and Arizona State (in the final) to cut down the nets at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and ride to the NCAAs as a No. 10 seed. USC very nearly turned the same trick in 2003, when the Trojans, as the seventh-place team in the Pac, rolled to the final of the league tourney but got knocked off by fifth-seeded Oregon. This is a school that knows how to make a run for the brass ring at the Pac-10 Tournament, so with the end of the regular season in sight (just two more weekends remain on the slate), Southern California wants to prepare for the start of something big.

USC almost entirely owned the first half. The Trojans built a daunting 18-point lead with under three minutes left before halftime. Give credit to Stanford, which closed the half on a 9-0 run to bring the contest to single digits at the break. Unfortunately for the Cardinal, USC regained a winning edge in the second half and again pushed its lead to as many as 20 points. Nikola Vucevic had a tremendous outing for the victorious visitors, scoring 19 points and grabbing 14 rebounds. Alex Stepheson and Donte Smith added 15 points and 13 points for head coach Kevin O’Neill’s ballclub, which is trying to rev up the engines for the second weekend of March.

Stanford shot poorly all evening long, finishing at just 33 percent. The Cardinal were a paltry 3-of-17 beyond the arc. Josh Owens had a team-high 13 points while Jeremy Green and Josh Huestis scored 11 apiece. The Stanford defense was suspect all night long as USC shot 53 percent from the field, including a scorching 57 percent from the three-point line.

USC Trojans @ Stanford Cardinal Basketball Recap