STANFORD, Calif. – Alanna Smith led four Cardinal in double figures with 20 and Stanford scored 45 first-half points to beat Washington State 70-57 on Friday night.
Smith's 20 paced a strong night for Stanford's starting five, which combined for 59 points. Kiana Williams added 15, Brittany McPhee 12 and Kaylee Johnson 10 to go with 15 rebounds. Stanford (10-7, 4-1) ran its record to 63-0 all-time against Washington State (8-9, 1-4) with the win.
Smith scored four in a 10-0 run to open the game and Stanford never looked back. The Cardinal led 22-7 after one quarter and 45-17 at halftime.
Stanford made 10 of its first 14 shots in a dominant opening period that ended with eight straight Cardinal points. On the quarter's final possession, Stanford grabbed two offensive rebounds and concluded the sequence with a Maya Dodson putback to go up 15.
The Cardinal outrebounded WSU 18-3 in the first and ended up a season high +22 on the glass for the game.
Chanelle Molina, who topped Washington State with 19 points, made a layup early in the second to cut the Cougar deficit to 14, but Stanford ended the final 7:23 of the first half on a 16-2 run. The first nine points in the spurt were scored by Smith and Williams, who each had 12 in the first half, and the final seven came on a 3-pointer from Nadia Fingall, a layup from McPhee following an Alexa Romano steal and a Dodson layup.
Borislava Hristova added 14 points for the Cougars, but hit just 5-of-19 from the floor. WSU shot a dismal 34 percent (24-of-71) from the floor and was at just 29 percent (15-of-51) heading into a fourth quarter in which it outscored Stanford 25-12.
Stanford's 13 3-point attempts were a season low with the Cardinal instead doing most of its damage in the paint. It outscored WSU 46-26 on the block, its highest total since last Dec. 28 against Yale (58) and the program's most in a conference game in four seasons. Stanford had 49 points in the paint in an 80-56 win over No. 14 Arizona State on Jan. 20, 2014.
Johnson's double-double was the 10th of her career and first since March 4, 2017 when she went for 11 and 12 in a 71-56 Pac-12 Tournament win over Oregon.
Williams, the reigning Pac-12 Freshman of the Week, scored in double figures for the eighth time in her last 10 games. The 20-point outing for Smith was the sixth of her career and third this season.
