Sweet assassin

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 2001 by Kyle Veltrop

Stanford finally has its missing piece --a supremely confident superstar --in nice guy Casey Jacobsen

Less than 24 hours have passed since Casey Jacobsen's brilliant second half against USC helped him retain the title of "best player on the nation's best team." It also is less than 24 hours before the next challenger, UCLA, will force him into one of his worst games and alter his title to "best player on one of the nation's best teams."

But for now, and these times are rare, Jacobsen's mind isn't on basketball. His mother, Becky, is in town with some of her friends for the UCLA game, and dinner is fast approaching on the agenda.

Standing outside Maples Pavilion, as students lay out sleeping bags to camp for tickets to the next day's game, Jacobsen is wearing a T-shirt, droopy sweat pants and a black hat that is on backward. He needs some better clothes to wear, and for that matter, a reservation would be nice.

Nice. Hmmm. That word fittingly describes him. He is polite as can be. Articulate. An excellent student at Stanford. Stanford, for crying out loud!

The guilty pleasure of this laid-back southern California guy is watching Dawson's Creek or Temptation Island And now he's working his cell phone trying to figure out how to get nicer clothes and reservations at a nice restaurant so he can have a nice dinner with his mother and her friends. Nice, nice, nice. Yes, fitting indeed.

Or is it? New Mexico's Marlon Parmer, whose Lobos played victim No. 17 on Stanford's string of 20 straight before the Bruins' upset last Saturday, says: "That dude's a killer. He's a trained killer." New Mexico coach Fran Fraschilla follows by saying: "(Casey) looks like a surfer, but he plays like an assassin."

A trained killer? Assassin? Our Casey? Believe it.

Despite that 6-point loss to UCLA, Stanford belongs in a group with Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, Michigan State and Illinois as the class of college basketball. Stanford's case as the best team in the nation will stand up against anyone's.

And this much is beyond argument: This year's Cardinal is better than the team that went to the Final Four in '98, better than the one that won the Pacific-10 in '99 and better than the one that was a No. 1 seed in the 2000 NCAA Tournament. This one has upgraded its quickness and creativeness. Though always a team that favors size, it never has had twin towers play like twins 6-11 Jarron and 7-0 Jason Collins are playing. Senior point guard Michael McDonald has progressed from liability to asset. And most important to the Cardinal cause: Now, all Stanford men are not created equal.

"There is a superstar on that team, and that's Casey Jacobsen," USC coach Mike Bibby says.

There are players in the nation who score more, shoot more. There are players who rebound a lot, lot more and hand out many more assists. But if you think opponents alter their game plan for anyone more than they do for Jacobsen, then you either just don't get basketball, or you are part of the 90 percent of the country that doesn't get Stanford games on TV.

Here's what you're missing: Jacobsen is as good a shooter as you'll see. Jacobsen, in fact, often lines up 25 feet from the hoop and at any moment is apt to unleash his jumper, the most beautiful thing in northern California, the school's tree-lined Palm Drive notwithstanding.

Few can create scoring chances better than Jacobsen, who also can penetrate and finish or dish off to burn defenses consistently. In that USC game, he scored 18 of his 22 points in the second half despite hitting only two 3s, as he dipped and scooped and hooked his way to big points.

For all of Stanford's talk about balance and teamwork, and the evidence of both is substantial, you should know this: Jacobsen must come up big in March, or the Cardinal won't. Balanced Stanford squads were dismissed from the past two NCAAs in the second round.

When Jacobsen is hitting, there isn't a better team around. When he isn't, such as his 4-for-18 showing against UCLA, this team is ripe for an upset. When the Cardinal was upset by No. 8 seed North Carolina last March, Jacobsen hit just 2-of-12 shots.

But if you are looking for ample examples of Jacobsen's failures, you'll have to keep looking. He comes from a family that is to basketball what our president's is to politics. His dad, Von (San Diego State), and brothers Brock (University of San Diego) and Adam (Pacific) all paved the way for Casey. Brock, Adam and Casey achieved their long-stated goals of playing D-I ball by following a much-publicized, Von-designed regimen to help them get the most out of their abilities. But Casey, 19, is no RoboShooter. You half expect to see orange dimpled leather instead of eye whites when you look at him, but there is nothing robotic about him. Jacobsen plays with a fire that envelopes the court and his team.

Though initially shrugging about why Parmer or Fraschilla would refer to him in such a way, Jacobsen eventually followed up with this: "I've trained my body, and I've trained my mind to always be in attack mode. Even if someone has denied me well for a while, as soon as they relax for that one second, that's the second I'm going to burn you. Against USC, they shut me down in the first half, and they may have thought that they did a really good job, but in my mind I knew they couldn't do it the whole game. I knew eventually they were going to get fired. I knew I wasn't going to get tired. The single moment you lose sight of me or relax and think you're doing a good job, that's the moment I score."