UW Basketball | Mitch Johnson helps Stanford pick up the pace

It won't take long for Washington basketball fans to realize this isn't the same Stanford Cardinal team of the past few seasons.

"We don't have 14-feet of twins in the middle anymore," says Cardinal point guard Mitch Johnson. "That's a big difference."

But the changes for Stanford — which makes its annual Edmundson Pavilion visit tonight at 7:30 — go deeper than just the loss of 7-footers Brook and Robin Lopez, who each left last season for early entry to the NBA.

Also departed is coach Trent Johnson, a Seattle native who left for LSU.

In his place came longtime Duke assistant Johnny Dawkins, who noticed the glaring hole in the middle and decided to fill it from the outside, allowing his players to run as they seldom had.

"It was something I was going to do either way," Dawkins said of a more up-tempo approach. "Just something about our personnel, I felt our guys were capable of it."

Stanford isn't quite the old UNLV Runnin' Rebels, but they are scoring at a higher clip — 77.3 points per game, second in the Pac-10 — than any Cardinal squad since 2002. Stanford never scored more than 70 points a game during the four-year Trent Johnson era.

All of that means a different role for Mitch Johnson, a senior and graduate of O'Dea High who last season worried mostly about getting the ball inside to the Lopez twins. This season, he has been asked to operate at a higher speed.

"We have a little more freedom to get out and run," he said. "I don't want to say it's run and gun, but just get the ball into the open court and everybody run. We're trying to have more of a balanced attack."

Said UW coach Lorenzo Romar: "They are playing much more up-tempo than people are accustomed to seeing."

And except for one game, it has worked well. Stanford enters tonight's contest 11-1, the lone loss a shocking 30-point blowout at home last Thursday to Arizona State. Previous to that, the Cardinal was being lauded as one of the surprise teams in college basketball after a 10-0 start that included a 111-66 win over Texas Tech. The ASU game, however, might have been a wake-up call as Stanford rebounded to beat Arizona two days later, 76-60.

"We're not as good as the team that beat Texas Tech and not as bad as the team that lost to Arizona State," Johnson said. "As long as we remember that, we'll be OK."

Johnson, son of former Seattle Sonic John Johnson, gets a lot of credit from Dawkins for helping Stanford adapt to its new style.

"He's been terrific for us," Dawkins said of Johnson, who is averaging 4.7 assists and 8.1 points while shooting a career-high 42 percent on three-pointers. "I know it's been an adjustment for him from what he's done in the past and he seems to have embraced it."

This will be the final game in Seattle for Johnson, who is 1-2 at Hec Ed with the Cardinal.

"I'd be lying if I said it doesn't mean something coming home," he said. "But I think I'm past the Mitch vs. UW or me trying to prove myself kind of thing. I just want to win and do what I've been doing."

With Stanford suddenly looking like it might not suffer as much of a post-Lopez drop-off as many expected — the Cardinal was picked ninth in the preseason Pac-10 media poll — tonight's game takes on added importance for both teams, each potential NCAA tournament participants.

The Huskies are surging, 10-3 overall and 1-0 in conference play after a 68-48 win at Washington State on Saturday. The Huskies have won eight straight.

Still, some question just how good the Huskies are given that seven of the wins came at home, none against ranked teams, and the Cougars suddenly look like a shell of what they were the past two years.

But there will be little questioning if UW gets a sweep this weekend of Stanford and California — the Bears might be the only more surprising team in the Pac-10 than Stanford at 13-2 overall.

Romar said he sees a confidence brewing in his team, saying that at practices early this week "we were probably dialed in a little more."

But he also says that after two years when the Huskies always seemed to be trying to overcome adversity in Pac-10 play, the challenge now is dealing with success.

"Can you come back and build on what happened last week?" he asked. "It remains to be seen how we handle it."

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com.