Player of the Week

This past Monday, the conference office announced that senior guard Jamie Weisner was named Pac-12 player of the week.

Weisner led the No. 7 Beavers to a home sweep last weekend, en-route to tying a program record with 14 straight wins and giving OSU a 15-1 conference record, sitting tied atop the Pac-12 standings with Arizona State. With the win over ASU earlier this season, the Beavers own the head-to-head tiebreaker.

“Usually you don’t win that award if your team is not good or not winning,” Weisner said. “So it’s a whole team award.”

In last Friday’s matchup with USC, Weisner scored 18 points to help OSU to 76-52 win. On Sunday’s top-15 contest against No. 12 UCLA, the Beavers got a marquee victory, 64-54, helped by Weisner’s 25 points and a career-high 14 rebounds. In that game Weisner also shot 4-for-6 from the three-point line and 7-for-8 from the charity stripe.

Weisner is fourth in the Pac-12 with 17.7 points per game, fifth in three-point percentage (43.4), sixth in field-goal shooting (48.8) and second in free throw percentage (87.4).

OSU will play Stanford on Friday and Cal on Sunday this weekend, for the Beavers’ last regular season games.

Balance

In the Beavers’ win against UCLA last Sunday, the big three for OSU: Weisner, junior point guard Sydney Wiese and senior center Ruth Hamblin, combined to score 62 of the Beavers’ 64 points, with senior forward Devin Hunter having the other two points.

Other than Weisner’s 25, Wiese scored 21 and Hamblin contributed 16.

“We don’t want to see where it’s only three people scoring,” Wiese said. “We try and have five scorers out there at all times.”

Hamblin said that having balance will be huge for the Beavers for the rest of the season.

“I think it’s a little unusual for us,” she said following the UCLA win. “Usually we’re known kind of for spreading around and having a lot of contribution especially off the bench.

If any game needs balance, the one against Stanford on Friday is certainly one, with the Cardinal having a stifling field-goal percentage defense of 32.1.

“(When we have balance) is when we’re at our absolute best,” head coach Scott Rueck said. “You can’t assume you’re going to go on the road and have one or two scorers, it needs to be everybody.”

The Cardinal

OSU has never in the history of the program defeated Stanford in Maples Pavilion, where they are 0-28 dating back to 1987.

Back in mid-January, the Beavers were able to defeat Stanford for the first time in over a decade. They came back from as much as 15 points down to claw their way to a win, giving OSU one of their premier wins of the season, especially how the Cardinal has been a perennial powerhouse.

With Friday’s matchup the Beavers will also look to have back-to-back wins over Stanford for the first time since the 1991-92 season to go along with a program-high 15-game winning streak.

“Stanford is a smart team, they love to do schemes, they love to take away things that you want to do offensively and defensively,” Wiese said. “They know what team’s weaknesses are, so they try and pick on those.”

OSU is first in the nation in field goal percentage defense (30.9) and Stanford is following directly after (32.1), proving that they’re nobody to mess with either. The Beavers will need to carry their consistently solid defense to the Silicon Valley, and stop the scorers for the Cardinal while simultaneously being efficient on the offensive side of the ball.

“(We need) to be prepared to make plays, and play big in these moments,” Wiese said.

“It’s just another weekend,” she said. “I think we’re trying to focus on what we need to do in order to win.”