Cal holds on for road win over NC State

Balanced scoring leads Bears past Wolfpack, 65-62

photo via @calmbball twitter

Progress in any form is something to celebrate.

Cal wasn’t amazing against NC State. The Bears struggled all game long with turnovers, struggled at times to secure the defensive glass, and couldn’t pull away against a team that only hit one three pointer all game long.

But Cal also found baskets when they needed them, got contributions from up and down the lineup, played mostly solid defense, and earned a road win on the East Coast. For a team struggling at .500, a road win against a similar team counts as modest progress.

Cal’s leading scorer, Jovan Blacksher, only put up 14 points, but that’s just fine when your 5th leading scorer puts up 10 points. Blacksher was joined in double figures by DeJuan Campbell, Mady Sissoko, Andrej Stojakovic, and Jeremiah Wilkinson.

Two specific developments encouraged me:

1. Cal had a solid overall offensive game despite an off-night from Andrej Stojakovic.

2. Cal held an opponent to slightly below average offensive production!

Regarding that first point: Cal’s leading scorer did manage to get to 10 points, but he required 16 shots to get there and turned the ball over 4 times in the process. It’s clear that he’s getting more and more defensive attention now that he has proven himself as a volume scorer in ACC play, and he had a rough couple of games in Carolina this week as his opponents sent a variety of traps and doubles at him.

But perhaps the defensive focus that NC State put on Stojakovic opened up space for his teammates. Bears other than Andrej shot 13-23 (57%) on their 2s and 6-14 (43%) on their 3s while getting to the free throw line at a reasonable clip. Sissoko had another inspired game inside, Campbell was more aggressive attacking the paint, Wilkinson picked his spots and was efficient from three, and Blacksher had arguably his best game since returning from injury in early December.

Meanwhile, Cal had an solid defensive performance! For the season, NC State shoots 50.2% on their 2s. Against Cal, they shot exactly 50%. Cal held NC State to roughly their average turnover and offensive rebound percentage. So why was the defensive performance slightly above average? NC State got to the line a bit less than usual (the game was called loosely by the refs) and NC State went 1-10 from three.

It might be that Cal didn’t have much to do with NC State’s crummy 3 point shooting performance, and NC State isn’t a good deep shooting team anyway, so the difference between what they did against Cal and a ‘typical’ performance is all of two fewer made threes. Then again, when the final margin is three points, two extra missed threes turns out to be pretty important.

But even if you want to say Cal held NC State to roughly their average offensive performance when you remove factors outside of Cal’s control . . . well, frankly, holding a team to their average is a big deal for this team. It’s happened about five times in Cal’s last 11 games and the Bears are 3-2 in those games . . . and 0-6 in the rest. OK defense gives this team a chance to win games.

The defense did look better to my eyes. Sure, there were still moments of frustration - failures of communication regarding switches and help responsibility, struggles to force misses at the basket, or the inability to secure defensive rebounds on a couple of free throws. But NC State settled for 30 shots classified as midrange, and for the first time in a while Cal’s defense forced a team into bad shots at high volume, while contesting those shots reasonably well.

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A 9-9 record through 18 games wasn’t exactly what anybody around Berkeley was hoping for. Cal just took a 2-8 stretch in the chin, and that run of games contained loses of nearly every type.

Perhaps this win can be a catalyst. NC State isn’t a great team or anything, but they’re a roughly average ACC team and Cal beat them on the road without getting much from their best player.

And if you look at the schedule ahead, the road is full of opportunity. Sure, a road game against SMU is unlikely, but the other five games in Cal’s next six are all at home in Berkeley against teams that range from good-not-great (Florida State, Wake Forest) to meh (NC State again, Syracuse) to bad (Miami).

If Cal can build on a couple of relatively encouraging recent defensive performances and continue to take advantage of Andrej Stojakovic and/or the attention Andrej Stojakovic garners from ACC defenses, they could take 3 or 4 out of their next 6 games. And a nice run here would give Cal a fighting chance at earning a .500 record in the stretch run of the season.

A modest goal? Good gravy, yes. But it’s been eight years since Cal last enjoyed winning as many or more basketball games than they lost, and recovery from the rockiest of bottoms is sometimes measured in frustratingly tiny increments.