Cardinal virtues
Mike Montgomery may not be remembered as one of the all-time great coaches in college basketball, what with no national titles on his resume and four top-10 teams. A closer look at his record over 18 seasons, though, and his value to the Cardinal becomes obvious. Sixteen postseason appearances, a Final Four in 1998, a brush with perfection last season — not to mention a school-record 393 wins.
His departure from Stanford for a job as the head coach of the local NBA team, Golden State, left the Cardinal with a void not unlike the ones at North Carolina when Dean Smith retired or at Indiana when Bob Knight was let go.
As with those two schools, Stanford opted for continuity over change, looking for its man from a pool of Montgomery assistants.
Enter Trent Johnson. An aide to Montgomery for four years, Johnson left Stanford in 1999 and perfectly timed a run to the Sweet 16 last season at Nevada to emerge as the guy to replace the man.
“Things haven’t changed, thankfully,” said Cardinal senior center Rob Little. “We didn’t want a big change. We wanted Montgomery’s style to stay in place and it has with Coach Johnson. They may have different techniques to get the job done, but it is what it is.”
Still, one thing this year’s Stanford team can’t do is match the overpowering run for perfection that last year’s team made, an undefeated string that lasted until the last game of the regular season. This year, the Cardinal already have four losses – twice as many as last year – and it hasn’t started the Pac-10 season, something that will happen Friday in the Spokane Arena against Washington State.
The 30-2 record of a year ago doesn’t make life easier for Johnson, who not only has been charged with continuing Montgomery’s successful run but also trying to maintain the impossibly high standard set by last year’s team, from which four key players are no longer around.
“I don’t think it’s fair to any team or any program to compare them to last year’s team,” Johnson said. “These kids are very bright, they’re very articulate, and they understand how hard it was to have the success that they had last year – and how hard it was for the Stanford teams of the past to have their level of success. That’s something that we don’t talk about. We talk about our expectations for ourselves individually and collectively, and just go on from there.”
But fair or not, other teams will look at this year’s Stanford team as a chance for redemption, quite possibly including WSU, which nearly ended the Cardinal’s unbeaten season before losing on a buzzer-beater last February.
“We are the hunted,” Little said. “A lot of teams are going to want to get us good.
“We want to win for Coach Johnson just as much as Coach Montgomery. But there’s a little more pressure for a first-year coach.”
For the 48-year-old coach, who grew up in Seattle and played for Boise State, that pressure is something he doesn’t seem to notice. He has spoken of his players’ growing comfort level as the season has progressed, and expressed confidence that his first Stanford team will end up far better than the way it started. (Take, for instance, a disappointing loss to Santa Clara earlier in the year.)
As for his own comfort level?
“I was comfortable from Day One,” he said. “The players are the ones that have to play and make plays. For me, getting comfortable was never an issue.”