Stanford University’s men’s basketball team will face the University of California, Berkeley in their first meeting of the season on Saturday at 5 p.m. The game will take place at Maples Pavilion and be broadcast on ACC Network.
Stanford has started the season with a 14-5 record, which is its best opening since the 2019-20 campaign. The team has secured four quadrant one wins according to NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) rankings, including victories over North Carolina, Louisville, and Virginia Tech.
Freshman Ebuka Okorie has been a standout performer for Stanford. He currently ranks seventh nationally in scoring with an average of 22.1 points per game and is third among freshmen. Okorie is among only three freshmen nationwide who are averaging more than 20 points per game this season, alongside Duke’s Cameron Boozer and BYU’s AJ Dybantsa. His performances have earned him top-10 national freshman of the year rankings from ESPN, Bleacher Report, and Hoops HQ.
Okorie recently broke his own freshman scoring record by posting 36 points against North Carolina on January 14. He made 12 out of 20 shots from the field, hit three three-pointers, and converted nine free throws during that game. This marked his fourth 30-point performance in his last seven games. His total ties for the fifteenth-highest single-game point total in Stanford program history and is the most by a Stanford player since Chris Hernandez scored 37 against UCLA in 2005.
Stanford’s recent form includes winning five consecutive games against Cal, their longest such streak since they won six straight between March 2003 and January 2006. Last season, Stanford swept Cal in all three meetings for the first time since 1962 and went undefeated against them during regular season play for the first time since 2015.
The Cardinal also claimed victory at the Acrisure Invitational tournament earlier this season after Benny Gealer hit a buzzer-beater to defeat Saint Louis on November 28.
Former player Maxime Raynaud graduated from Stanford in 2025 following a notable career before being drafted by the Sacramento Kings last June. Since December, Raynaud as well as Brook Lopez, Spencer Jones, and Ziaire Williams have each scored at least twenty points in NBA games. Raynaud averages ten points per game this NBA season while Jones has started twenty-eight out of thirty-nine appearances for Denver Nuggets.
Heading into Saturday’s matchup with Cal—currently ranked No.60—Stanford sits at No.67 in NET rankings as of January 22. Seventeen out of Stanford’s thirty-one regular-season games are classified as either quadrant one or two matchups; eleven fall under quadrant one category alone.
Among ACC teams this year, only Duke and Virginia join Stanford with four or more quadrant one wins—a benchmark achieved by just sixteen other programs nationally who all rank within NET’s top twenty.
