by Matt Harrington

PALO ALTO–The Stanford Cardinal are trying to add another winning banner to their NIT record like they did last season and it was a big one in terms of the program you had with two players who really stepped up and had huge contributions and these are players that are going to be asked to come back next year and fill some pretty big roles.

It’s good to see Marcus Allen put up 22 points a career high who went 10-12 on shooting for the night, that’s pretty impressive hitting two threes that’s good for him. He’s going to be called upon to fill the role Chasson Randle once Randle is gone. Allen is expected to be one of the returning five in the guard position.

It’s going to be on his shoulders next season so it’s good to see Allen contributing with a big effort and the Reid Travis picking up a double double plus ten rebounds. He’s going to spot in for a departing player Anthony Brown whose going to be gone next year. Travis is going to have to fill that forward role with a different look from Brown.

Brown is a good three point shooter, a good defensive stopper when the ball is on the court, Travis in that game against UC Davis was a monster down there, he was a physical presence and he’s going to bang away in the paint and pick up some rebounds and some points there in the paint and that’s what he showed in that game and that was a good sign for the future of the Cardinal against UC Davis.

There was a little caveat it was Randle going for that 18 points and he’s 62 points away from heading into that number one spot for career points all time for Stanford. It was a meaningful game, it was an impactful game even though it was an NIT game against a team that Stanford normally plays in the first couple weeks of the season and it was good they had Davis early on the schedule.

The game with Rhode Island is going to be interesting on Sunday, the Rams are not a team that blows you away on paper. You start with two players that are averaging double digits in scoring and one of them is a bench player. You start looking at it and you start wondering what does this team have? You start seeing some of the teams that the Rams played and they faced Delaware and Kansas and they played them very close. So the game with Stanford is expected to be a tight ball game at Maples Pavilion.

Matt Harrington is a beat writer for Stanford Cardinal basketball for http://www.sportsradioservice.com listen to the podcast below