Two Programs, One Pavilion, and a Winter of Proving

Maples Pavilion has seen more than its share of greatness. It was the home court of Tara VanDerveer’s teams, which won national championships in 1990, 1992 and 2021 and made Stanford the standard in women’s college basketball for a generation. It has hosted men’s teams that sent Brook and Robin Lopez, Josh Childress and others to the NBA. This winter, both programs return to it with something to prove, and for different reasons.

The Men: After Okorie

Last season belonged to Ebuka Okorie. The freshman guard from Nashua, New Hampshire, averaged 23.2 points a game, led the ACC in scoring and set conference freshman records for scoring average and for 30-point games, according to Stanford Athletics. In June, the Oklahoma City Thunder selected him 17th overall in the NBA Draft, and his rights were reportedly traded to the Detroit Pistons that night. He became the 14th first-round pick in program history and the highest Stanford selection since Ziaire Williams in 2021.

Okorie’s departure gave Stanford a draftee for the third consecutive year, after Maxime Raynaud in 2025 and Spencer Jones in 2024. It also leaves head coach Kyle Smith, entering his third season, with the most familiar problem in modern college basketball: replacing a player who carried an outsized share of the offense.

Smith’s answer appears to be depth. The 2026-27 roster, as published by Stanford Athletics, pairs returning forwards Donavin Young, Tallis Toure, Aidan Cammann and Kristers Skrinda with three experienced transfers: guard Christian Bliss from Delaware, seven-foot center Austin Maurer from Seattle, and fifth-year forward Nick Townsend from Yale. Forward Evan Stinson returns after a medical redshirt.

The freshman class is the most closely watched element. It includes Aziz Olajuwon, Julius Price, Elias Obenyah, Drew Anderson and Isaiah Rogers. At the ACC’s preseason media day in Charlotte, Smith singled out Price, a combo guard from Stockholm who has played for Sweden’s national team. “The one that’s been the most ready is probably Julius Price,” Smith told reporters. He was careful, too, to temper expectations, noting that freshmen face an adjustment “academically and socially,” especially at Stanford.

That caution is characteristic, and wise. Smith has built his program around player development and roster continuity in an era that rewards neither. Whether depth can substitute for a singular scorer will be the defining question of the men’s season.

The Women: Rebuilding a Standard

For the women, the question is larger. Kate Paye, a longtime VanDerveer assistant and former Stanford player, enters her third season as head coach after succeeding the winningest coach in college basketball history in 2024. Her first two teams did not reach the NCAA Tournament, a striking break for a program that had made the field every year for nearly four decades. Last season Stanford finished 21-14 overall and 8-10 in the ACC.

The roster has turned over substantially. According to Stanford Athletics, the 2026-27 team has 12 players and no seniors. It is built around two sophomores: guard Hailee Swain, an ACC All-Freshman selection last season, and 6-foot-5 forward and center Alexandra Eschmeyer. Three transfers, Inés Sotelo Míguez from Michigan State, Charlotte Tuhy from American and Ilse de Vries from Miami of Ohio, add size and experience, and four freshmen complete the group.

Paye has been direct about the goal. “Obviously we expect to be playing in the NCAA Tournament,” she said at the ACC’s preseason media day on October 6, according to the conference’s transcript. “That is our goal.”

She has also chosen a hard road to get there. “We are the only Power 4 school to play five other Power 4 schools and five true road games,” Paye said of the nonconference schedule, describing it as intentional: a young roster, she argued, should learn about itself early.

There was a telling detail in Paye’s remarks. Before the school year, she said, the players organized and led a team retreat on their own, to Muir Woods and Stinson Beach, which she described as a first in the program’s history. It is a small thing. But programs that recover their standing usually do so because the players, not only the coaches, decide what the standard will be.

A Shared Challenge

Both programs face the same structural reality. The ACC is deep in basketball, and Stanford’s place in it requires long travel and road games in arenas built on decades of tradition. Both also operate in the new economics of college sports, where the transfer portal and revenue sharing make roster stability harder to achieve than ever.

There is reason for optimism in each case. The men have an unusually deep roster and a coach who has shown he can develop talent; Okorie, who had originally committed to Harvard, arrived with far less fanfare than he left with. The women have two young players their coach clearly regards as cornerstones, and a program history that remains a powerful recruiting argument.

The seasons begin in November. For a campus that once took March for granted, the most interesting basketball story may be the work of earning it back.

Photo: Eric Chan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)