by Jeremy Harness

PALO ALTO CA–Stanford Men’s (2-0) head coach Johnny Dawkins came up under Duke University head coach Mike Kryzewski and Dawkins has the same expectations that Kryzewski has for his team that he had at Duke. He’s been trying to build a winner at Stanford and some years have been more successful than others.

Even though they were able to make it to the lead eight where they eventually fell to Dayton, more often than not year after year they fell off into the middle of the pack and never really make any noise and at this point you have to wonder when this team is going to finally break out. Hopefully we’ve seen a little bit of that based on what we’ve seen from the NCAA Tournament.

When you look at it it was really a surprise even going into the basketball tournament they were still middle of the road so nothing had really changed from that point in time. They somehow got into the NCAA tournament and got hot. The Cardinal won their first two games of the season and their expected to win those games.

Anytime your a Pac 12 team your expected to take care of business with those mid major teams and actually lower than that. Their first semi-test will be this coming Friday in Brooklyn vs. UNLV. From that point the next real test after that is next month in December when they go to Texas on the 23rd.

At that time we’ll see what kind of team that the Cardinal really are, they don’t really have the strengthened schedule they’ve had in the past few years. They played UConn and Syracuse and those types of teams you don’t really see that other than the Texas game. The Cardinal went to the NCAA Tournament and made it to the second round.

Anytime you face a 2-0 team they have a winning streak going on there’s something that goes along with it. The feeling of winning the conference is great and this is a tournament that you have to be prepared for. Thankfully for Stanford they have enough returning players where they should be equipped to deal with that.

Some of the key Stanford players thus far are Stefan Nastic who is a classic post up center he has a lot of skills and has great passing skills, guard Chasson Randle can get really hot he’s a scoring machine, he can go for 20 and there was a game in the NCAA Pac 12 Tournament a couple years ago against Arizona State where he scored in the 37-40 point range. Anthony Brown is a much improved player at the guard-forward position, he’s got long arms and he makes a lot of noise on defense he a great player and he’s an up and comer.

Jeremy Harness is filling in for Michelle Richardson for the NCAA commentary and covers Stanford basketball on http://www.sportsradioservice.com