On Saturday night, the Trojans followed up their big Thursday night win against Cal with their 14th straight win at home against Stanford.
USC defeated Stanford 85-75. Captains fifth-year guard Drew Peterson and senior guard Boogie Ellis scored 54 points combined.
Stanford came out strong with five points early, and USC was behind until Ellis’s first 3-pointer of the game — a jump shot assisted by sophomore guard Kobe Johnson to tie it at 15-15 with 10:47 left in the first half.
From then on, the Trojans took control and never trailed Stanford for the remainder of the game.
“We’re definitely finding our stride. Everybody is shooting the ball well, [and] we have a lot of great shooters on our team,” Ellis said. “I feel like we struggled earlier, but Coach [Andy Enfield] knows that we’re a great shooting team, so we just got to keep going, taking it day by day and having a lot of confidence.”
Ellis had 15 points after the first half, and Peterson wasn’t far behind with 11 points after just coming off achieving a new career high in scoring 30 against Cal.
Stanford let off several offensive rebounds in the first half, which allowed the Trojans to score eight points in second-chance opportunities.
USC led by 11 points after the first half with a score of 41-30.
After being sidelined for the last four games because of a foot injury, sophomore guard Reese Dixon-Waters returned to action and had a stand-out game as the third-highest scorer for the Trojans, putting up 12 points.
Dixon-Waters also had a strong defensive performance, posting two steals and a block.
“I’m being more aggressive on defense and taking advantage of opportunities guarding people,” Dixon-Waters said. “In practice, I got to guard Boogie, Kobe and Drew and all the rest of the guards on the team, so playing against everybody else, I’m not saying it’s easy, but I love the challenge.”
Redshirt junior forward Joshua Morgan also sat out for the last four games due to an injury and in his return against the Cardinal he scored four points.
Ellis made nine out of 16 shots from the floor, six out of 10 from 3-point range and made each of his nine free throw shots. He reached a new career high with 33 points, a career high in assists with seven and tied his best mark with six 3-pointers.
When asked how it felt to reach his new career high in points, Ellis took more pride in one of his other personal bests from the game.
“It felt good, but I’m more proud of myself with the seven assists [because] I’ve been working on that a lot, watching a lot of film and just trying to become better with my passing,” Ellis said.
Ellis wasn’t the only part of the offense that found success. The rest of the team shot a combined 29-for-59 from the field and 13-for-25 from deep.
“When you play four guards, they have to do a good job at dribble penetration and draw the defense in and then kick it out at the right time,” Enfield said. “That’s how I think we got 25 threes up, and we were fortunate to make 13.”
However, Stanford outscored the Trojans in the paint 38-22.
“We have to do a little better job protecting the rim,” Enfield said. “It’s kind of unusual because we’ve been so good with 2-point defense the last four years.”
USC has four regular season games remaining and is currently sitting in third place in the Pac-12 with a record of 19-8 overall and 11-5 in conference play.
The Trojans will travel to play Colorado on Thursday at 6 p.m.